Russia has admitted that the number of deaths due to COVID-19 is three times higher than previously reported – making it the country with the third highest number of deaths from the epidemic.
Experts have long questioned President Vladimir Putin’s repeated claims of a low death rate from the virus, which he bragged about shows that Russia is doing a “better” job at managing the crisis than Western countries.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova on Monday finally proved that critics were right when she revealed that the true death toll was likely 186,000 – not the officially reported 55,000.
Golikova announced the revelations after the Russian Statistics Agency said that deaths between January and November had increased by 229,700 compared to the previous year.
“More than 81 percent of this increase in deaths during this period is due to COVID,” Julikova said, according to Agence France-Presse.
The new number means that the death toll in the country is the third highest in the world, after the United States with more than 335,000 dead and behind Brazil with 191,000, Johns Hopkins University data show.
So far, Russia has only allowed about 3.1 million confirmed infections among its population of 144 million.
Putin, 68, recently explained that he is now planning to get a Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine in his country, After a month of saying it He won’t get the shot.
With wires
