Moscow has closed its Euro fan zone and banned gatherings of more than 1,000 because of a spike in Covid-19 cases, the mayor of the Russian capital said on Friday. “I didn’t want to do this, but we have to,” Sergei Sobyanin wrote on his website a day after saying that cases in Moscow had nearly tripled in just days.

“We are temporarily stopping all mass entertainment events and we’ll also have to close dance halls and fan zones.”