The truth about Russia’s hidden Covid deaths

The secret is out: the Russian government has been lying to its people. Officially, Russia’s coronavirus death toll for last year — as reported on state television and logged at the World Health Organisation — was an impressively low 86,498 for a population of 146 million. In his traditional December press conference Vladimir Putin proudly reeled off statistics on how quickly Russia’s economy was recovering from the pandemic, and last month he made a triumphant address to a packed public concert to celebrate the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea in 2014. ‘Today is a holiday for our entire vast country,’ Putin told an 80,000-strong, maskless crowd at Luzhniki stadium. ‘Please, take a deep breath and answer this: Do we love Russia?’ Covid-19 was not mentioned.

The reality, however, seems to be different. Russia’s excess deaths for last year stand at 323,802, some 18 per cent higher than 2019. Many official Russian death certificates record unexplained ‘viral pneumonia’ as the cause of death, rather than Covid-19. By contrast the US experienced a 17 per cent rise in excess deaths last year, 82 per cent of them Covid-related. Britain reported the same 17 per cent spike — though in the UK there were actually more Covid-related deaths than excess deaths, due to lower than normal mortality from seasonal influenza.

In short, either Russia has experienced a hitherto unexplained and unreported parallel pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 of its people — or the country in fact has just as bad a Covid death toll as any in the developed world.

So what did Russia do wrong? Like many European governments, including our own, the Kremlin initially played down the seriousness of the outbreak. In March and April last year, Russia sent humanitarian shipments of PPE equipment to Italy and to the US, a PR stunt widely covered by state-controlled media.