Remote, Forbidding, and Infected: The Coronavirus Is Spreading in the Russian Arctichttps://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/remote-forbidding-and-infected-the-coronavirus-is-spreading-in-the-russian-arctic/ampTalk of a coronavirus quarantine in Belokamenka, a Russian village on a remote bay in the Barents Sea, began to leak out in early April. Since 2017, tens of thousands of construction workers from across the country—and also from China, Turkey, and Central Asia—have been travelling in and out of the village to build a supply facility for a twenty-one-billion-dollar liquid-natural-gas project run by Novatek, one of Russia’s largest privately held energy companies.
Early this month, several workers posted on social media about how, after arriving in the village, they were placed in mandatory quarantine, presumably so that the infected among them would not inadvertently spread the virus at the sprawling construction site. For many, the quarantine only lasted four or five days, instead of two weeks, as is recommended by most health officials—and those newly arrived workers lived in tightly packed dormitories and ate together in a crowded dining hall. Videos posted on social media showed lines of hundreds of people waiting to pass through checkpoints or be tested for the virus.
Within several days, dozens of workers at the Belokamenka site tested positive for COVID-19. By mid-April, that number grew to more than two hundred; the local administration declared a state of emergency, and medics from the federal emergencies ministry arrived to build a field hospital in a snow-covered spot near the construction site.
... “Everything is being kept closed and secret,” one man told me. “So there’s no panic, I guess.” One thing was obvious, though. “The more of us there are crammed together, the more infections there will be,” he said. As of Monday, there were eight hundred and sixty-seven officially registered cases of COVID-19 in Belokamenka—more than in most entire Russian regions. The BBC Russian Service declared the village “the largest recorded outbreak in Russia.”
... one particularity of the virus in Russia has been its spread in remote settlements above the Arctic Circle, in places such as Belokamenka—forbidding outposts that exist to service the country’s lucrative oil-and-gas industry. Otherwise cut off from the rest of the world by geography and climate, they are connected to the rest of Russia and beyond through their ever-rotating workforces—which, in the time of a global pandemic, serve as a dangerously efficient vector for spreading the virus.
In recent weeks, a number of far-flung oil and gas fields across Siberia and Yakutia—a Russian republic that is five times the size of France—have been hit by their own localized COVID-19 outbreaks. Dozens of people have tested positive for the coronavirus at the Chayanda natural-gas field in Yakutia, which provides most of the gas for the Power of Siberia pipeline, the cornerstone of a four-hundred-billion-dollar energy deal that Russia signed with China, in 2014.
On Monday evening, hundreds of workers gathered in an angry protest against conditions at the site; a video of the demonstration appeared online. In it, one worker yells, from the crowd, “What are we, pigs?” Another says, “Where is the quarantine? Where are the masks? There is nothing! They’ve crammed us all into dormitories, where we’re infected with who knows what.” The governor of Yakutia announced that all ten thousand workers at the Chayanda field have since been tested, and, although the results are not ready yet, “the number of sick people there is significant.”
As of Tuesday, more than a hundred and thirty workers from the Yamal liquified natural gas project have tested positive for COVID-19.
Another hot spot is Sabetta, a port on the Kara Sea, which serves as a transport hub for liquified natural gas (L.N.G.) from the Yamal Peninsula, a four-hundred-mile stretch of permafrost jutting into the Arctic Ocean. In 2017, Putin himself launched the Yamal L.N.G. project, with great fanfare. Last year, it exported eighteen and a half million tons of L.N.G. on ice-breaking tankers.
... In late March, a new contingent of workers—several hundred people—passed through the Sabetta airport. Chaos ensued: some newly arriving crews were put under mandatory quarantine before being let into the general population; others were sent to work right away. “It all started from there,” one worker at the Yamal L.N.G. site told me. Two weeks later, in mid-April, a handful of people reported fevers and other common COVID-19 symptoms. As at Belokamenka, the Yamal bosses said little, even as the first suspected coronavirus patients went to hospitals in nearby cities. As of Tuesday, more than a hundred and thirty workers from the site have tested positive for COVID-19.
... at first, the virus came to the Arctic from the “mainland,” as the rest of Russia is known among locals and workers in the far north, and now it risks reëntering the general population through the country’s Arctic hot spots. In late April, nearly two dozen workers from the Yamal L.N.G. site who returned home to Buryatia, a Russian republic near the border with China, tested positive for the virus. At Belokamenka, an evacuation flight last week—to take ostensibly uninfected workers to Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains, nearly two thousand miles away—was cancelled at the last minute, after a number of would-be passengers tested positive.
... On Tuesday, I saw a list of those who tested positive in the latest round of testing at Belokamenka: eleven hundred and forty-five people, out of a work force of four or five thousand. ...
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Sabetta Airport Closes as Coronavirus Spreads Across Russia’s Arctic Oil and Gas Fieldshttps://www.arctictoday.com/sabetta-airport-closes-as-coronavirus-spreads-across-russias-arctic-oil-and-gas-fields/... Commuter workers at Russian’s remote oil and gas fields appear to have brought infection to outposts in the region. The closure of the airport in Sabetta, on the Yamal Peninsula, comes as more than 140 people now are registered as carriers of the coronavirus in the remote industrial town.
Flight Radar data obtained by the Barents Observer on Saturday showed that an aircraft from the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations was en route to Sabetta. The aircraft, an Ilyushin-76 transport plane, is similar to the flights that on April 12 brought a mobile hospital to Novatek’s Belokamenka plant outside Murmansk.
In Belokamenka, about 900 workers are now registered as infected.
... The decision was soon protested by Novatek. Subsidiary company Yamal LNG argued that regional health authorities are not entitled to close an airport and has addressed “competent authorities” with the complaint, RBC reports.
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