New data from the country’s statistics agency, Rosstat, shows that during the first 11 months of 2020, there was an increase of more than 229,700 more deaths in Russia than during the same period in 2019.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, who is in charge of responding to the country’s coronavirus, said Monday that “more than 81% of this increase in mortality in this period is due to Covid”. According to a CNN calculation, this means that 186,000 Russians died of coronavirus in those months.
With a real number of 186,000 Covid-19 deaths, Russia would have the third highest number of all countries in the world, after the United States and Brazil.
Golikova’s statement marks the first time that a Russian official recognizes what critics have long suspected: that the true number of coronavirus deaths in Russia is much higher than the official, which is less than 56,000.
Russia has reported more than 3 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, but has maintained a comparatively low mortality rate thanks to the way it handled the pandemic.
Critics expressed overwhelming skepticism about Russia’s official figures, saying the problem lies in the counting method that allows attributing the deaths of patients infected with coronavirus to other causes and allowing authorities to claim a smaller number.
For example, Rosstat said that 35,645 people with coronavirus or suspected coronavirus died in November, but added that in about a third of fatalities Covid-19 was not considered to be the leading cause of death or a major factor in death.
Russia’s coronavirus task force, which publishes daily statistics on new cases and fatalities using a methodology different from Rosstat, reported only 12,229 coronavirus-related deaths in November.
This method of counting differs from the guidelines of the World Health Organization, which state that all deaths related to Covid-19 should be counted, unless there is “a clear alternative cause that cannot be related” to the disease.