Russia’s covid-19 outbreak is far worse than the Kremlin admits
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RUSSIA IS MORE successful in fighting covid-19 than the West, thanks to its superior health-care system and excellent leadership. Though faced with one of the highest rates of infection, its fatality rate is a seventh of that in most countries. That is, if you believe Russian statistics.
Few independent experts do. Russia has officially recorded just over 300,000 cases of covid-19 and 2,900 deaths, which makes its fatality rate less than 1%, compared with 4.5% in Germany and 14% in Britain. Yet the fatality rate among Russia’s front-line health professionals, who keep their own records, is about 16 times as high as in comparable countries, which suggests that the official figures are much too rosy.
Nonetheless, these were the figures that on May 11th led Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, to order an end to a period of “non-working days”, a euphemism for a national lockdown that he never officially declared. Although he transferred responsibility for retaining restrictions to...