Dozens of employees at Moscow’s famous Bolshoi Theater have tested positive for coronavirus and have been quarantined at home, the theater’s director Vladimir Urin said Monday.
The 34 infected Bolshoi staffers were asymptomatic but were banned from working on a star-studded live concert in an empty theater that aired on state television Saturday, Urin said. He maintained that none of the “several hundred” people who were involved in organizing the Bolshoi’s “My Vmeste” (“We’re Together”) concert had tested positive.
“Without exception, all of the theater’s personnel, including security guards and engineers, were tested for coronavirus two days before the concert,” Urin said as quoted by the state-run TASS news agency.
“Thirty-four people tested positive for coronavirus. They didn’t have a fever or clear signs of illness, but they were all suspended from work and sent to quarantine,” Urin said. “There’s no way that dozens of cases were identified at the concert itself.”
Urin previously estimated the Bolshoi Theater’s daily losses from its closure at $114,000 per day and warned that the legendary theater is at risk of closing down if Moscow stays in lockdown until September.
Moscow has become the epicenter of Russia’s Covid-19 outbreak, with 11,513 out of the country’s 18,328 reported cases as of Monday.
More than 6,000 coronavirus patients with mild symptoms are receiving treatment at home in Moscow. The city’s health department says it has carried out 315,000 coronavirus tests in two and a half months.
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