Moscow rolls out mass coronavirus antibody testing programme

Moscow began testing thousands of randomly-chosen residents for coronavirus antibodies on Friday under a mass screening programme authorities hope will help them determine when it is safe to lift the city’s lockdown restrictions.

Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, has said the real scale of the outbreak is much bigger than official data shows because many people will not have manifested symptoms and therefore not realised they are carriers.

Sobyanin said mass testing would help identify such people, paint a reliable picture of the outbreak’s spread, and allow officials to relax the lockdown without risking lives when the time was right.