Russia has admitted that the death toll in COVID-19 is three times higher than previously reported, making it the country with the third-highest number of deaths from the pandemic.
Experts have long questioned President Vladimir Putin’s repeated claims about a low death rate from the virus, which he bragged as Russia doing “better” at managing the crisis than Western countries.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova finally proved the critics right on Monday when she revealed that the actual death toll was likely 186,000 – not the officially reported 55,000.
Golikova made the disclosure after the statistics agency Rosstat said the number of deaths increased by 229,700 between January and November compared to the previous year.
“More than 81 percent of this increase in the death rate over this period is due to COVID,” said Golikova, according to Agence France-Presse.
The new figure means the country’s death toll is the third highest in the world, after the US with more than 335,000 deaths and just behind Brazil with 191,000, data from Johns Hopkins University shows.
So far, Russia has only shown nearly 3.1 million confirmed infections among its 144 million inhabitants.
Putin, 68, recently made it clear that he now plans to get his country’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, a month after he said he wouldn’t get the chance.
With pole wires