JAPAN is preparing new social distancing requirements in the face of the rapid spread of the omicron variant of coronavirus, while Russia announced it would shorten isolation periods to seven days.

Moscow claimed the policy — which echoes the US and British governments’ decision to reduce prescribed isolation times so runaway infection doesn’t keep people away from work — was part of “optimising our approaches to quarantine and testing.”

The number of daily infections in Russia has doubled in the past week, and the country has lost 322,000 people to Covid, the highest figure in Europe. The new variant is also on the rise at “an unprecedented speed” in Japan, which said voluntary restrictions on bar and restaurant opening hours would be applied in 16 regions, with financial incentives for compliance.

Elsewhere, Greece this week began implementing monthly fines for anyone over 60 who is still unvaccinated.

Fines of €50 (£42) this month will rise to €100 monthly from February in a policy condemned across the Greek left as likely to further impoverish pensioners in a country where the mortality rate has risen sharply over the past decade because of health cuts imposed by the EU in return for a series of bailouts.

The Greek government says unvaccinated pensioners pose a burden on an overstretched healthcare system.

Communist Party of Greece leader Dimitris Koutsoumbas said on a visit to a hospital in Attica that the strain on public healthcare was the result of successive governments’ commercialisation of the sector.

He called for a recruitment drive for health workers, permanent contracts for temporary healthcare workers and requisitioning of private-sector hospitals to address the crisis.