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MOSCOW: Russia said on Monday (December 28) that its death toll from COVID-19 was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third highest death toll.
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 of handling the pandemic than Western countries.
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But since the start of the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government was 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-19,” said Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova, meaning that more than 186,000 Russians have died from COVID-19.
Russian health officials have recorded more than 3 million infections since the start of the pandemic, putting the country’s number of cases to the fourth highest in the world.
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But they have only reported 55,265 deaths, a far lower death rate than in other severely affected countries.
Russia has been criticized for only listing deaths from COVID-19 where an autopsy confirms the virus was the main cause.
Alexei Raksha, a demographer who left Rosstat in July, told AFP last week that Russia’s Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Consumer Health falsify coronavirus figures.
The new Rosstat figures mean that Russia now has the third-highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world behind the United States with 333,140 and Brazil with 191,139, according to an AFP tally.
The figures came as authorities opposed reimposing a nationwide lockdown in hopes of propping up a struggling economy, even as the country is being hit by a second wave of infections.
Russia’s government predicts that the economy will contract 3.9 percent this year, while the central bank expects an even deeper drop.
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 the health regulators, then we don’t need any blockade,” he said.
While strict measures have been imposed in some major cities, authorities in many regions have limited restrictions on the use of masks in public spaces and reduce mass concentrations.
But many Russians disobey social distancing rules, and in recent weeks the outbreak in the country has overwhelmed underfunded hospitals in the regions.
VACCINE SKEPTICISM
Instead, Russia has pinned its hopes on stopping its outbreak by vaccinating people en masse with its homemade Sputnik V jab, named after the Soviet-era satellite.
The country launched a mass vaccination program earlier this month, first vaccinating high-risk workers ages 18 to 60 without chronic diseases.
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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 around 700,000 doses had been released for home use so far.
However, Russia has not said how many people it has vaccinated so far, and according to recent polls by state pollster VTsIOM and polling agency Levada, only 38 percent of Russians plan to get vaccinated.
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