Russian authorities claim that the mortality rate from coronavirus in the country is much lower than in the rest of the world. According to April data from the Moscow government, the overall mortality rate in the capital increased by 18% compared to April 2019. The low lethality of Covid-19 may be related to the counting methodology.
In Russia, the mortality rate from coronavirus is very low, as the head of Rospotrebnadzor, Anna Popova, has repeatedly noted. According to her, this result was achieved due to “timely detection and timely treatment [of patients]”. “On average, the mortality rate from the new coronavirus infection in Russia is 7.6 times lower than the global average. In Moscow, this figure is 6.8 times lower than the world average,” said Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova on May 12.
In April, 1,145 people died from coronavirus in Russia. More than half of the deaths occurred in Moscow, where 642 people died from Covid-19. On May 10, experts drew attention to new data on overall mortality in Moscow. The civil registry office published information according to which more than 11.8 thousand people died in the capital in April. This is 18% more than in April last year and 20% higher than the average mortality rate for this month in 2010-2019. In absolute terms, April was almost 2,000 deaths above average. But if only 642 people died from Covid-19 that month, where did the other nearly 1.4 thousand deaths come from?
Russian authorities do not manipulate statistics, Golikova said on May 12. The reason may be that Russian authorities use a slightly different method of calculating coronavirus mortality than other countries. The Russian service of the BBC explains the difference. Comparing coronavirus mortality rates between countries is not easy because of differences in counting methods. For example, Belgium includes in its final Covid-19 mortality statistics deaths in which coronavirus infection was only suspected. As a result, Belgium’s data on coronavirus deaths are much higher than those of other countries. Most countries include in their statistics all persons who died and tested positive for coronavirus. This means that not only patients who died directly from COVID-19 are counted, but also patients in whom COVID-19 was a concomitant disease. Russia, according to the methodology of the Ministry of Health, counts deaths directly caused by Covid-19 separately from deaths from related illnesses. The Moscow Times previously noted that at least some Russian regions are doing just that.
We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what happens next. Episodes The end of the story: Advertising podcasts. Apparently, Moscow’s official Covid-19 statistics only include deaths directly caused by the coronavirus. The Moscow Times spoke to Sergey Timonin, an associate professor at the Institute of Demography at the Higher School of Economics, who said that these deaths account for about 35% of all officially confirmed Covid-19 deaths. As the BBC’s Timonin clarified, he reached this conclusion based on a comparison of various sources of information (Timonin sent his comments to the BBC after the publication of this article). According to his estimates, as of early May, about 1,500 people in Moscow with confirmed coronavirus infection may have died during their lifetime, but whose initial cause of death, according to the results of autopsies conducted, was other diseases. “The final and verified information on the number of deaths with coronavirus as the primary cause and [deaths] with coronavirus will be published by Rosstat on the basis of medical death certificates, including those issued in place of preliminary and final ones,” Timonin told BBC. – The same will be done in other countries, and the final figures will be adjusted”.
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After the publication of this material, the Ministry of Health commented on the lethality statistics of Covid-19. “When analyzing the growth of mortality, it is necessary to take into account that even in cases where a new coronavirus infection is diagnosed, other conditions, such as acute vascular pathology, other acute diseases, as well as external causes, can be the initial cause of death,” the Ministry’s comment to the TASS agency says. The chief freelance pathologist of the Ministry of Health, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Georgy Frank, has previously spoken out against considering the coronavirus as the main cause of death in all patients diagnosed with Covid-19. In some cases, he noted, the coronavirus is only a background disease. “In some cases, Covid-19 can be the main cause of death, while in other cases it can simply be the background of the disease, sometimes even a comorbidity if it goes very smoothly and the person has another serious disease. If a person has advanced stomach cancer with metastases and at the same time has a mild form of Covid-19, then of course the stomach cancer takes first place and leads to the patient’s death,” Frank said on the program “Echo of Moscow. Experts in several countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., believe that the overall increase in deaths during the epidemic must be taken into account when analyzing coronavirus mortality. In this case, all deaths from Covid-19 are included, regardless of how the diagnosis was made. Such data also help to understand how many people have died as a result of indirect effects of the pandemic, such as overburdened health care systems.