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Russia said on Monday that its death toll from coronavirus was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-highest death toll in the world.
For months, President Vladimir Putin has bragged about Russia’s low death rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a “better” job in managing the pandemic than Western countries.
Experts, including medical professionals and data scientists, have questioned official statistics for months, accusing the government of downplaying the country’s outbreak.
On Monday, Russian officials admitted that was true.
Statistics agency Rosstat said the number of deaths from all causes recorded between January and November had risen by 229,700 compared to the previous year.
“More than 81 percent of this increase in mortality during this period is due to COVID,” said Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, meaning that some 186,000 Russians have died from COVID-19 during 2020.
The data also showed that more people died in Russia in November 2020 than in any other month since the data began to be collected 16 years ago, the Moscow News reported.
Musicians perform in front of a hospital to congratulate child patients on the upcoming New Year, in Moscow. The country is battling a second rising wave of COVID-19 [Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters]
Excess deaths, the difference between all deaths recorded in 2020 and previous years, is considered one of the most reliable indicators of the number of people who have died as a result of the pandemic.
While Russia has confirmed more than three million coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, the fourth-highest number of cases in the world, it has only reported 55,265 deaths and has been criticized for only listing COVID-19 deaths where an autopsy has confirmed the virus. as the main cause.
Alexei Raksha, a demographer who left Rosstat in July, told the AFP news agency last week that the Russian Health Ministry and the Consumer Health Ministry had falsified the coronavirus figures.
The new Rosstat figures mean that Russia now has the third-highest number of deaths from COVID-19 after the United States, where 334,618 people have died, and Brazil, with 191,570 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
‘Follow the rules’
Despite the country facing a second rising wave of infections, authorities have been reluctant to impose a nationwide lockdown for fear of causing further damage to an already struggling economy.
The government predicts the economy will contract 3.9 percent this year, while the central bank expects an even steeper decline.
During his annual year-end press conference earlier this month, Putin rejected the idea of imposing the kind of blockade that many European countries introduced before the Christmas holidays.
“If we follow the rules and demands of health regulators, then we don’t need any blockade,” he said.
While strict measures have been imposed in some large cities, authorities in many regions have limited restrictions on the use of masks in public spaces and reduce mass concentrations.
A member of the Russian armed forces receives the Sputnik V (Gam-COVID-Vac) vaccine against the coronavirus disease. The country puts its hopes in the vaccine to stop the pandemic [File: Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters]
But many Russians disobey social distancing rules, and in recent weeks the outbreak in the country has overwhelmed underfunded hospitals in the regions.
The country has pinned its hopes on ending the outbreak on vaccination and a massive deployment of its Sputnik V jab, which is named after the Soviet-era satellite.
The country launched the program earlier this month, first vaccinating high-risk workers ages 18 to 60 without chronic diseases.
Over the weekend, people over 60 were given the green light to get the vaccine.
On Monday, the developer of Sputnik V, the Gamaleya state research center, said that so far approximately 700,000 doses had been released for home use.
However, Russia has not said how many people it has vaccinated so far, and according to recent polls by state pollster VTsIOM and voting agency Levada Center, only 38 percent of Russians plan to get vaccinated.
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