Officially Russia has declared 79,000 deaths linked to Covid-19, however this has proven to be a lie, as new information indicates the figure to be 480,000.
When Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, in May wrote that the excess mortality rate in Moscow last year was three times higher in Moscow than the official number of covid-19 deaths, the news spread internationally. At the time, the Russian Foreign Ministry called the information "anti-Russian speculation."
Now the newspaper Meduza reports even greater differences between the official Russian figures and reality.
Russia's official figures for the number of dead during the corona pandemic come from the Rospotrebnadzor authority and currently stand at 79,000 dead. However, on Monday the country’s statistics institute published data, revealing that the excess mortality in 2020 stood at 358,000, compared to the average deaths from the last couple of years.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova announced that 31 percent of the excess mortality rate in 2020 was due to covid-19, in other words 111,000 deaths. But the official death toll sent daily to the WHO is still below 80,000 dead.
Independent Russian newspaper Meduza now states that the Ministry of Health for the Moscow region has estimated that 98-100 percent of the excess mortality is due to the corona pandemic.
This number makes Russia the country with most coronavirus deaths during the pandemic. Details that official Russian statistics under-report coronavirus-linked deaths are very sensitive to Russia and President Vladmir Putin.
Assuming that almost all of the excess mortality is due to the pandemic, "the number of covid-19 deaths is 6.3 times higher in 2020 than the 57,000 the country officially reported last year," according to researcher Dmitrij Kobak at the University of Tübingen.
If the excess mortality has remained at the same level in January and February this year, more than 480,000 Russians have died of Covid-19, not 79,000 as officially presented, Kobak stated.
When taking excess mortality figures into account as basis for counting covid-19 related deaths, the United States deaths would reach about 550,000, or 1.2% higher than the country’s official figure. However, per capita, Russia would be the country with the most deaths with 0.33% of the population having died of coronavirus compared to 0.17% in the US.
The Brussels Times
