Russia said Monday that the death toll from the coronavirus is more than three times higher than previously reported, making it the country with the third largest number of deaths.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been boasting about Russia’s low death toll from the virus for months, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job of managing the pandemic than Western countries.
But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government is reducing the country’s outbreak.
On Monday, Russian officials acknowledged that was true. The statistics agency Rosstat said that the number of deaths due to all causes increased by 229,700 between January and November compared to the previous year.
“More than 81% of this increase in mortality during this period is due to Covid,” Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova said more than 186,000 Russians had died from Covid-19.
Russian health officials have registered more than 3 million infections since the start of the pandemic, which puts the country’s ranking at the fourth highest in the world.
But they reported only 55,265 deaths – a much lower death rate than in other hard-hit countries.
Russia has been criticized for listing only Covid deaths where an autopsy confirms the virus was the main cause.
Covid-19 cases in Russia
Alexei Raksha, a demographer who left Rosstat in July, told AFP last week that the Russian Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Consumer Health were falsifying the number of coronaviruses.
The new figures from Rosstat mean that Russia now has the world’s third highest Covid 19 death rate behind the US with 333,140 and Brazil with 191,139, according to the AFP count.
Russian authorities are not trying to impose a nationwide exclusion again. The Kremlin hopes to sustain the struggling economy, even as the country is plagued by a second wave of infections.
The Russian government predicts that the economy will shrink by 3.9% this year, while its central bank expects an even deeper decline.
During his press conference at the end of the year earlier this month, Putin rejected the idea of imposing the kind of closure that many European countries instituted during the Christmas holidays.
“If we comply with the rules and demands of health regulators, we need no lockdown,” he said.
Although strict measures have been put in place in some large cities, the authorities in many regions have limited restrictions on wearing masks in public spaces and reducing mass gatherings.
But many Russians dispute the rules of social distance, and in recent weeks the outbreak of the country has overwhelmed the hospitals in the regions that are poorly funded.
Russia has instead pinned its hopes on repairing its outbreak by vaccinating people with its Sputnik V-jab, named after the Soviet-era satellite.
The country launched a mass vaccination program earlier this month, vaccinating high-risk 18-60-year-old workers without chronic illness.
Over the weekend, those over 60 got the green light to receive the shot.
On Monday, the developer of Sputnik V, the state-run Gamaleya research center, said about 700,000 doses have been released for home use so far.
Russia, however, has so far not said how many people have been vaccinated, and according to recent surveys by the state-run polling company VCIOM and the Levada polling agency, only 38% of Russians plan to get the chance.