After months of denial, Russia admits the virus is taking hold

The mayor of hard-hit Moscow acknowledged that 'the situation is becoming increasingly problematic'

The authorities in Moscow said on Friday that coronavirus cases are increasing rapidly here and have already pushed the city’s health care system to its limit.

Warning that the outbreak in the Russian capital was far from reaching its peak, Anastasia Rakova, a deputy mayor responsible for health, said that the number of people hospitalised with the illness related to the virus in Moscow had more than doubled over the past week to 6,500. Nearly half of those infected are under the age of 45.

The city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, sounded a further alarm, saying that the virus “is gaining momentum” and that “the situation is becoming increasingly problematic.”

A flurry of bad news on Friday about the outbreak indicated that Russia, relatively spared until now from the ravages of the virus, has started on the same harrowing path taken weeks ago by hard hit countries like Italy and now the United States. This has dashed hopes in the Kremlin that its decision in late January to close Russia’s long border with China, the original source of the virus, and then limit travel from Europe had contained the outbreak.

President Vladimir V. Putin, who usually takes the lead with great fanfare in times of crisis, has mostly stayed in the background. He has retreated to his country residence outside Moscow, leaving Mr. Sobyanin, the mayor, and Russia’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, to take the heat for a health crisis that now looks set to get far worse.

Ms. Rakova, the Moscow official, warned that the capital’s ambulance service and hospitals were now stretched to the limit. The virus has also started to wreak havoc in Russia’s vast hinterland, where the ramshackle health system seems to be contributing to the spread of the pathogen.

Hospitals in at least two regions are already overwhelmed by infected patients. In Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi oil-producing region northeast of Moscow, the main hospital has more than 200 infected people, while scores of medical personnel and more than a thousand patients at a hospital in Ufa, 700 miles east of Moscow, have been ordered not to leave the premises after 170 people there tested positive.

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