Russia’s pandemic update

RUSSIA ECONOMICS - In Brief 26 May 2020 by Alexander Kudrin

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As several influential media sources, such as last week the FT, Bloomberg, The Economist, accused Russia of significantly under-reporting the country’s death toll and suggested that the actual number of the virus-related lethal cases should have been higher by around 70%, the Russian authorities continued to publish statistics in line with the methodology offered by the WHO. GKEM Analytica in the previous notes referred to these officially reported “confirmed” or “registered” cases only, as there is no other consistent data set available on day to day basis. The tune performed by the chorus of Russia’s accusers referred to some studies which suggested that recently reported death toll is underestimated and to have the more reliable figure one needs to compare recently published data with average monthly figures reported in the past five years or so. That might be a good idea, and not for Russia’s case alone, but other countries as well. The problem, however, that it may not be wise to force the doctors who do their day-to-day business 24/7 and report the incoming and outgoing patients in thousands to calculate average daily numbers daily for the past periods. It may be a good backward-looking exercise for academicians and journalists, but not for medical workers and not even for the authorities who report daily statistics to the WHO and have to make daily decisions on the ground.Note, the Russian side never claimed it had full knowledge of the real number of contaminated, it always referred to those who were registered as contaminated after positive tests. Therefore, accusations of the authorities of deliberate cheating have a rather unpleasant flavor.In recent weeks t...