Authorities in Kiev sealed off a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery on Monday after reporting that two of its members had died and more than 90 had contracted the coronavirus, accounting for around a fifth of the Ukrainian capital’s cases. The city administration has dispatched doctors and mobile X-ray machines to the sprawling Kiev Pechersk Lavra complex, the headquarters of the Russian-backed wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church known as the Moscow Patriarchate. “We must have a real picture of the outbreak,” Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a statement.
