Russia said on Monday that the death toll from coronavirus was more than three times higher than previously reported, making it the country with the third highest number of fatalities.
For months, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted of the low mortality rate of the virus by Russia, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job in managing the pandemic than Western countries.
But since the beginning of the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government was minimizing the country’s outbreak.
On Monday, Russian officials admitted this was true. The statistical agency Rosstat said the number of deaths from all causes recorded between January and November had increased by 229,700 compared to the previous year.
“More than 81% of this increase in mortality during this period is due to Covid,” said Deputy Minister Tatiana Golikova, which means more than 186,000 Russians have died from Covid-19.
Russian health officials have recorded more than 3 million infections since the start of the pandemic, placing the country’s number of cases at the fourth highest in the world.
But they have only reported 55,265 deaths, a much lower mortality rate than in other severely affected countries.
Russia has been criticized for only listing Covid’s 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 health ministry and the consumer are falsifying coronavirus numbers.
Rosstat’s new figures mean that Russia now has the third highest number of deaths in Covid-19 in the world behind the US at 333,140 and Brazil at 191,139, according to an AFP count.
Russian authorities are reluctant to impose the reinstatement of a national closure. The Kremling hopes to bolster the struggling economy, even when the country is hit 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 year-end press conference earlier this month, Putin rejected the idea of imposing the kind of blockade that many European countries introduced for the Christmas holidays.
“If we follow the rules and requirements of health regulators, we will not need any blockages,” he said.
Although strict measures have been imposed in some large cities, authorities in many regions have limited restrictions on the use of masks in public spaces and the reduction of mass gatherings.
But many Russians reject the rules of social distancing, and in recent weeks the country’s outbreak has overwhelmed poorly funded hospitals in the regions.
Russia, on the other hand, has set its hopes on ending the outbreak by vaccinating people with its Sputnik V jab, which bears the name of the Soviet-era satellite.
The country began a mass vaccination program earlier this month, inoculating for the first time high-risk workers between the ages of 18 and 60 without chronic diseases.
Over the weekend, those over 60 were given the green light to receive the shot.
On Monday, the developer of Sputnik V, the state-owned Gamaleya research center, said about 700,000 doses had been released for home use so far.
Still, Russia has not said how many people have been vaccinated so far, and according to recent polls by state-owned polling company VCIOM and polling agency Levada, only 38 percent of Russians plan to get shot.