Russia has admitted that its death toll in COVID-19 is three times higher than previously reported – making it the country with the third highest number of deaths from the pandemic.
Experts have long doubted President Vladimir Putin’s repeated claims of a low death rate from the virus, which he boasted to show that Russia is doing a “better” job of managing the crisis than Western countries.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova on Monday finally proved that critics were right by revealing that the actual death toll was probably 186,000 – not the 55,000 officially reported.
Golikova made the revelation after statistics agency Rosstat said that deaths between January and November increased by 229,700 compared to the previous year.
“More than 81 percent of this increase in mortality in this period is due to COVID,” said Golikova, according to Agence France-Presse.
The new figure means that the death toll in the country is the third highest in the world, behind the USA with more than 335,000 dead and behind Brazil with 191,000, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
So far, Russia has revealed that it has only 3.1 million confirmed infections among its population of 144 million.
Putin, 68, recently made it clear that he now plans to receive his country’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, a month after saying he would not get the injection.
Wired Poles