In March 2021, 23.7 thousand people died in Russia with a diagnosis of Covid-19. This is almost the same as in February, when almost 24.4 thousand people died with a diagnosis of Covid-19. The overall mortality rate increased by 25% in comparison with March 2020.
In March 2021 a total of 191.3 thousand Russians died. This is 25% more than in March last year. Coronavirus became the main cause of death for 17.4 thousand people in March. In addition, Covid-19 was diagnosed in 6.2 thousand people, but the main cause of death was other diseases that could be aggravated by coronavirus. Rosstat highlights several categories in its statistics on Covid-19 mortality. The breakdown for March is as follows:
When analyzing coronavirus mortality, the excess mortality indicator is often used, measured in absolute terms or as a percentage. Excess mortality shows how much the number of deaths from all causes has increased compared with the average indicator over several years. Sometimes the trend of decreasing mortality is taken into account when calculating the expected number of deaths. Excess mortality takes into account the number of deaths from all causes and thus helps to assess both the direct and indirect impact of the pandemic.
In March, according to the calculations of the BBC, the excess mortality rate was 30.9 thousand people or 19% compared to the average for this month in the past five years (160,396 people). According to Rosstat, from April 2020 to March 2021, 248.5 thousand people died in Russia with a diagnosis of Covid-19. This is more than two times higher than the official data shown on the site stopcoronavirus.rf. “Open Media calculated that the excess mortality as of April 27 amounted to about 500 thousand people. Independent demographer Alexey Raksha came to the same conclusion. According to data analysis specialist Dmitry Kobak from the University of Tübingen, the excess mortality in Russia from April 2020 to March 2021 amounted to 482 thousand people.
In particular, the pandemic has affected the mortality rate of older generations in cities, as shown by Rosstat statistics on mortality rates (the number of deaths per thousand people in each age group). For example, across Russia, the mortality rate for the urban population aged 85 and over will increase by 18% to nearly 200 deaths per thousand people in 2020.
In Moscow, where the spread of the epidemic began in April 2020, mortality among the population aged 85 and older increased by 17.7% – almost reaching 125 deaths per thousand people.
The largest increase in urban mortality occurred in Chechnya. The mortality rate among city dwellers aged 85 and over increased by 2.5 times and reached 653 deaths per thousand people. According to Rosstat, at the beginning of 2020 there were 923 people of this age living in cities in Chechnya. The mortality rate among the inhabitants of Chechnya aged 80-84 and 75-79 years has more than doubled. At the beginning of 2020 in the cities of Chechnya there were more than 5.3 thousand people aged 75-84.
Across Russia, the number of new Covid-19 infections, which began to increase again after reaching a minimum in August 2020, approached the 30,000 mark by the end of the year. In 2021, the number gradually decreased and in mid-March it fell below the 10,000 mark. In April, the number of new cases fluctuates between 8,000 and 9,000. In Moscow there is a slight increase in infections and hospitalizations, according to data from the capital’s operational headquarters. In the first two weeks of April, the number of cases in the capital fluctuated in the range of 1-2 thousand people per day, and then the indicator began to rise. On April 29, for the first time since the end of January, the threshold of 3 thousand new infections was exceeded.
At the end of March, Deputy Health Minister Tatyana Semenova said that disease rates “allow us to speak of a third wave of coronavirus infection. However, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko later said it was “premature to talk about a third wave. In late April, Bloomberg reported, citing two unnamed officials familiar with unofficial government statistics, that Russia has already begun its third wave of the coronavirus.