New strain of COVID-19 thwarted Russian-Finnish plans

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland announced that the launch of the Allegro train between St. Petersburg and Helsinki has been postponed indefinitely. This is reported by the information portal Yle with reference to the Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Nina Vaskunlahti.

The official noted that she had no information about the exact date of the trains launch. The resumption of flights of the Allegro train was affected by the mutation of the coronavirus and the emergence of a new strain of "omicron". According to media reports, on Thursday, December 2, it became known about the first confirmed case of a new type of coronavirus in Finland. The Omicron strain was diagnosed in a Helsinki resident who had returned from Sweden. According to the THL National Institute of Health and Human Services, he has a mild case of covid. Whether the sick person had previously visited African countries is not reported.

As RBC previously reported, it was planned that Russia and Finland would restore passenger rail traffic between the countries next week, from December 12. According to the operational headquarters of the Russian Federation for the fight against coronavirus, they were going to launch “two pairs of trains a day on the St. Petersburg-Helsinki route, taking into account strict compliance with sanitary and epidemiological requirements.”

Trains to Finland were canceled in March 2020 due to the pandemic. In the pre-Covid 2019, Allegro transported 555,000 people. Among the passengers, 50% were Russians, 30% - Finns, 20% - residents of other states.