Many Infected, Few Dead. How Russia Manipulates Coronavirus Statistics

Moscow claims that Russia's COVID-19 fatality rate is 7.4 times lower than the global average.

Although Russia is already among the top three countries in the world by number of coronavirus cases, the country records only 13 COVID-19 deaths per million residents, while the global average is 36 deaths per million from the deadly infection. It is therefore no surprise that official Moscow's statistics have come under doubt.

This includes The New York Times, which noted that in April 2020 almost 2,000 more people died in the Russian capital than in the same month of each of the previous five years. Yet there were only 642 deaths from the coronavirus.

The whole point — Russian officials' own method of counting deaths, which allows them to embellish epidemiological statistics against a backdrop of overflowing morgues and hospitals. For example, after Vladimir Putin lifted the 6-week “non-working days” regime, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova stated that Russia's COVID-19 fatality rate is 7.4 times lower than the global one.

What is the essence of this method? Meduza, in its investigation, says that only those who died “from COVID-19” are included in the list of coronavirus deaths, not those who died “with COVID-19.” That is, if an infected patient dies from some complication related to a chronic illness, the post-mortem diagnosis names the coronavirus as the cause of death.

As a result, no more than a third of all people who died with the coronavirus in Russia end up on the official list of coronavirus deaths, according to calculations by demographer Sergei Timonin.

Moreover, in order to carry out orders from Moscow and follow wording from the center, some medical workers on the ground deliberately helped conceal COVID-19 deaths.

“They said that at the start of the epidemic, the pathology service of [one of the hospitals] was given an order that there should be no more than five or so COVID-associated deaths per day in the city,” an interlocutor at one of the hospitals repurposed for coronavirus tells Meduza. “So everyone who can be is written up as ‘cancer,’ ‘heart attack,’ ‘chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.’”

Although Meduza does not provide precise evidence that concealing the number of coronavirus deaths is federal policy, it is clear that by shifting responsibility onto regional governments, the top of the Russian government has created fairly convenient conditions for conducting the political process during the epidemic.

“You understand that we cannot have a fatality rate six times lower than everyone else's? — says demographer Daria Khalturina. — We don't think Russia has some special genetic brilliance, do we?”

As of May 15, almost 263,000 cases of COVID-19 infection and 2,418 fatalities have been registered in Russia since the start of the pandemic.