Russia announces third worse Covid-19 death toll in the world

Russia has announced that its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of casualties in the world, Moscow News newspaper reports.

Before now, President Vladimir Putin had boasted about Russia’s low death rate from the virus, saying the country had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries.

However, on Monday, December 28, Russian officials admitted that the death toll had climbed to an amazing rate.

The Rosstat Statistics Agency announced that the number of deaths from all causes recorded between January and November had risen by over 80 per cent.

Rosstat’s new figures mean that Russia now has the world’s third-highest death toll from Covid-19 after the United States, where 334,618 people have died, and Brazil, with deaths of 191,570, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

“More than 81 percent of this increase in mortality over this period is due to Covid-19,” said Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, meaning that 186,000 Russians have died from the coronavirus pandemic.

The data also showed that more people died in Russia in November 2020 than in any other single month since such data began being collected 16 years ago, the Moscow News newspaper said.

Excess deaths is the difference between all registered deaths in 2020 and previous years and are seen as 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 caseload in the world, it has reported only 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 coronavirus numbers.