RUSSIANS CHALLENGE OFFICIAL DATA
Some experts say crisis far worse than is being reported
MOSCOW
Unshaven and puffy faced, with tubes in his nose, a patient in a hospital’s coronavirus “red zone” recorded a desperate message for Russians.
“I turned my life and my health into a disaster,” said Innokenty Sheremet, 55, who is from the Ural Mountain region city of Yekaterinburg and came down with COVID-19 after forgoing vaccination.
“I turned into an infirm old man,” he continued, describing “terrible pain from any movement.” Many employees at his TV news agency also became infected. Sheremet survived, but his news service collapsed.
In Russia, a “fourth wave” of coronavirus is setting records in daily infection and death numbers, according to official statistics.
But the truth is far worse, say independent demographers and data analysts who are challenging the pandemic data issued by President Vladimir Putin’s government and who, in turn, are facing retribution from authorities.
At least three top researchers have been dismissed or have resigned from their posts in government or at state universities amid pressure from bosses.
Russia’s official statistics showed 221,313 pandemicrelated deaths by mid-October, but the independent demographer Alexey Raksha calculated that excess mortality — seen by analysts as the most reliable indicator of coronavirus deaths — has reached around 750,000. Raksha’s calculation used figures maintained by Rosstat, Russia’s statistical agency. Meanwhile, a report in the Moscow Times estimated the figure at about 660,000.
Russian independent
analysts say officials manipulated statistics and underplayed the crisis, most likely for political reasons — claims that have been made about governments in other countries, including China and Turkey. Critics alleging data manipulation by governments say the practice is an obstacle to a full global reckoning of the pandemic’s reach.
The Russian Ministry of Health and Rospotrebnadzor, the government agency that publishes daily coronavirus numbers, did not respond to requests for comment on allegations of low counts. Russian official statistics exclude many deaths of patients with the coronavirus where doctors judge another major factor was to blame, such as heart failure.
“The data for (Russia) is absolutely unreliable,” said Alexei Kouprianov, an independent analyst and biologist who last year organized a community of experts on social media, Watching COVID. He was fired from the St. Petersburg campus of the Higher School of Economics in September 2020.
As Putin’s government
tightens political control in the country, the handling of the pandemic has largely been left to the regions. The pandemic has exposed fragilities in a system in which regional officials conceal problems for fear of losing their posts and critics — even analytical experts — are sidelined.
Before the pandemic, life expectancy in Russia was 73 years, whereas it was 84 in countries including Australia, Italy and Spain, and its spending on health care was 5.6 percent of GDP compared with 16.8 percent in the United States and more than 10 percent in Japan and much of Europe, according the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Russian authorities say their handling of the pandemic has been better than the performance of many Western countries.
But with 43 million Russians fully vaccinated by Oct. 14, according to the Health Ministry, about 30 percent of the 144 million population, Russia’s vaccination rate is one of the world’s lowest, according to data from the Britain-based Global Change Data Lab.
Russia’s rate compares with 56 percent in the United States, 65 percent in Britain and 72 percent in Canada.
Recently, official Russian rhetoric has shifted. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Oct. 11 that mortality rates were high because of the “unacceptably low level of vaccination,” adding that “all conditions have been provided to citizens to save their lives by getting inoculated.”
Since Russian parliamentary elections last month, officials and state media have amplified warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus.
The daily coronavirus death toll hit a record 1,002 on Friday, and the country surpassed 33,000 daily infection cases, according to state-approved figures.
“Actually, excess mortality now is more than 2,000 people each day on average,” claimed the demographer Raksha, who was fired by the official statistical agency Rosstat last year for exposing alleged undercounting of daily deaths by the reporting agency Rospotrebnadzor.