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“There were 101 people on the approved list last Friday,” Lyudmila Letnikova, a senior official at the Ministry of Health, told parliamentarians. He is quoted by the Interfax news agency.
The head of the ministry’s public health department told parliament’s health committee that the ministry was collecting data on dead medical personnel, but it was the first time those figures had been made public.
Letnikova said the ministry had asked Russian regions to provide data on the number of deaths.
However, the official figure is much lower than the figures published online based on data collected by the doctors themselves. The last list contains 293 names.
The “Memory List” was launched in April. Among its initiators was Alexei Erlich, a cardiologist who works at the Moscow State Hospital.
The creators of the list said their goal is to provide reliable information about medical personnel because they fear the government will not.
When the list appeared on the Internet, the Health Ministry did not respond to a request from the AFP news agency to provide data on how many medical workers died of the coronavirus.
The independent news portal Mediazona reviewed the “Memory List” earlier this month and identified several people who were no longer practicing medicine or working in other former Soviet states at the time of their death. The portal confirmed 186 deaths.
Since the start of the pandemic, a total of 3,807 victims and 362,342 infections have been registered in the country. Russia ranks third in the world after the United States and Brazil in terms of the number of confirmed infections.
Russia’s published death rate is much lower than in other countries with similar morbidity rates, and critics accuse the government of trying to hide the true scale of the crisis.
Russian officials, for their part, claim that only deaths directly caused by the virus are counted in the country, unlike in some states, where all deaths of people infected with COVID-19 are recorded.
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