Organizational measures aiming to combat COVID-19 in the Russian Federation: the first experience

ABSTRACT

Background

Coronavirus infection (COVID-19) spreading took place in the Russian Federation in recent 10 months. Russia has a reliable and effective governmental public health infrastructure that worked at an advanced level to control the situation since the first day of receiving reports about pneumonia ofunknown etiology cases in December 2019 and the registration of the first COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China, in January 2020. Several measures were applied (administrative, organizational, technical, sanitary, and hygiene), nevertheless, creating an adequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic was 15 a challenge for the Russian national public health authorities.

Areas covered

We used official information of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing (Rospotrebnadzor), the Russian Federation Government, and Moscow Government, and the official World Health Organization (WHO);the analysis was conducted between 1 December 2019 and 31 March 2020.

Expert opinion

Rospotrebnadzor implemented a set of measures which comprised of three stages:

1. Stage 1 Preventive and sanitary measures;

2. Stage 2 Organizational and technical measures;

3. Stage 3 Organizational and preventive measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Administration
• COVID-19
• crisis management
• prevention
• Russia

Article highlights

• Rospotrebnadzor has temporarily prevented the import of the pandemic COVID-19 from the primary outbreak in China. This effort provided a time window to organize preventive measures.

• The analysis of all the anti-epidemic, administrative, and organizational measures exposed several bottleneck inefficiencies that need to be solved.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewers disclosure

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial relationships or otherwise to disclose.

Consent for publication

Written informed consent was obtained from all the participants prior to publication.

Ethics and consent

Since this Document was derived from official and anonymous aggregate datasets at the national level, ethical committee consideration was not applicable, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and ICMJE rules.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.