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Moscow, Russia's epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, is looking for a way out of the 'hole'. The confinement in which he has been running since March 30 has turned the most dynamic city in the country into an economic wasteland swarming by some bike dealers and too many unemployed citizens with the mask wrongly put on.

The Russian capital began a massive detection campaign for the coronavirus on Thursday to find out the size and evolution of this 'invisible enemy'. Before reopening restaurants and shops, it is necessary to establish the actual level of infection and the presence of antibodies in the Moscow population.

Russia reacted quickly by closing its border with China on January 30. But he neglected the 'western front' until early March, when he quarantined arrivals from a list of countries inside and outside the EU. At last the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobianin, took the initiative, imposing general confinement in the capital on March 30. But it was too late, the virus had become strong in the capital, which has been around 5,000 new infections daily since the beginning of May. Of the more than 250,000 cases in the country, more than 130,000 are in Moscow . Experts and the authorities themselves believe there could be many more.

Although this screening campaign is voluntary, the test is accessed by prior drawing: so there is no list to sign up on. Some 70,000 residents of the capital have already been randomly selected for the first wave, which will be repeated with samplings of more citizens every three days. The breadth of the study will be "unique in the world," the mayor of Moscow boasted. His promise is that soon 100,000 tests can be done per day, and then go to 200,000 daily.

Among the laboratory staff, the announcement has been received with disbelief: "I don't know how we are going to do so many tests, a third of my colleagues have fallen ill and there are no substitutes," explains Natalia, one of the doctors who deals with analyze samples. He asked his family to leave home as soon as he learned that his colleagues had tested positive. They did not return until yesterday, after their analysis was negative.

Caution

The City Council defends its tests. "We will know at all times which part of the Muscovites is infected by coronavirus and which has developed immunity. And most important of all: what is the real dynamics of spread of the disease," says the mayor. In a second phase the test may be extended to all interested Muscovites .

The personal results will be communicated immediately to each of the people who participated, with some recommendations from the doctors. Experts ask to be cautious. Elena Kleshchenko , biologist and analyst of the medical journal 'PCRNews', assures EL MUNDO that these mass tests are a good idea only "if two conditions are met: if the technical characteristics [of reliability] of the test are true and if People who test positive are explained the possibility of an error "and that their immunity is not real. "Everyone wants to hear that they have passed Covid-19 and have immunity, but for everyone who receives an incorrect positive, their decision to relax their quarantine measures can be deadly" to others.

The deputy mayor for social affairs, Anastasia Rakova, believes that this study will be key to achieving a hypothetical "collective immunity" one day, which would allow mobility of 12 million Muscovites, who are barely benefiting from the relaxation of the measures announced by Vladimir Putin this week. The problem is that, in good weather, many have already taken liberty on their own in the two main centers: Moscow and Saint Petersburg : 70,000 people bought train or plane tickets in those cities to visit their relatives in other regions. Putin has not taken the step of restricting internal traffic through the country during the bridge last week.

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