Coronavirus: How criticism and a change in counting method finally made Russia’s numbers believable

A change in methodology has pushed Moscow’s case fatality statistics closer to international levels, Oliver Carroll writes, but doubts about accuracy nationwide still linger

A change in methodology has pushed Moscow’s case fatality statistics closer to international levels (Mikhail Tereshchenko/Tass)

There have been few winners in the Covid-19 epidemic. But for a while, Russian statistics were certainly staking a claim. With the lowest case fatality rate of any major economy in the world, the Kremlin boasted of authoritarian professionalism and miraculous medicine. The western media outlets that suggested otherwise were referred to the prosecutor’s office.

Bureaucrats lined up to defend Russia’s numbers. “We never manipulate official statistical data,” said Tatyana Golikova, a deputy prime minister, on 14 May. “We’re not covering anything up,” said Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, a week later. Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s health and standards regulator, said much the same thing on 24 May: “No one in Russia has falsified anything and we simply have no other data.”

It was somewhat of a surprise, therefore, to see health authorities this week admit their critics had a point.

In a new directive published on Wednesday, Moscow’s Ministry of Health said it was changing counting methodology to include previously omitted deaths. If before, deaths were tallied only when coronavirus was the leading cause, now deaths would be considered even where the virus was a secondary or even suspected cause. In a parallel development, caseloads would no longer include asymptomatic cases, thereby increasing the fatality rate further.

The policy change had an immediate effect. On Friday, death tolls pushed an anti-record of 232, up more than a third on previous highs. Moscow’s health department revised previously published figures for Covid-19 deaths in April. (It had been keeping a second set of accounts after all.) Applying the new rules brought about a doubling of the fatality rate from 639 to 1,561; or 1.4 per cent to 2.8 per cent.

The rate was still lower than either New York (10 per cent) or London (23 per cent), as officials were keen to point out. But whether they liked it or not, authorities had also fact-checked the brunt of underreporting allegations made against them.

And even if Moscow is now embracing transparency, things remain far murkier when you look at the nation as a whole. We are still awaiting updated demographics data from Rosstat, the state statistics service, for April. In the days following the heath ministry’s change of methodology, the agency announced it would miss its own reporting deadline by two weeks. “Rosstat is committed to the quality, accuracy and reliability of its data,” a statement read.

A day later, the agency revealed it had caught someone trying to “copy and smuggle” data out of the building.

The data already in the public domain is enough to raise questions about the accuracy of regional data. A number of Russian academics have identified clear variations from expected distributions and trends, for example. One, Aleksei Kouprianov, associate professor at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, says many regions show the hallmarks of “manual manipulation.”

“In normal, unadulterated distributions, both caseloads and death counts follow normal mathematical functions,” he says. “You also expect the data to follow the same trends reasonably uniformly in any particular region. But that isn’t the case in several Russian regions.”

Here, the overall data is more uniform than expected, and towns and regions seem to take turns to get ill. If on one day, one part of the region sees a spike in cases, the other is reduced; the situation is reversed the next day to give a near steady overall number.

Rocketing rates of pneumonia across the country are another indication that all is not right with the exceedingly low death counts. In St Petersburg, for example, governor Alexander Beglov reported 697 deaths from community-acquired pneumonia earlier this month, six times the average. At the time of his announcement, the official Covid-19 death toll in the city was just 63.

“In some areas, the data looks totally contradictory, while in others it’s just fairly contradictory,” says Kourpianov. “We have particular concerns about the data coming from Lipetsk region, Chechnya, and Dagestan, which is all very, very strange from a modelling point of view.”

Dagestan is anecdotally the worst-hit region of any outside of Moscow. When the epidemic hit in April, the impoverished region in Russia’s southern mountains was totally unprepared – lacking PPE, a public health campaign, and basic drugs like antibiotics. When the regional health minister admitted on 17 May that 40 medics had died during the Covid-19 battle, official statistics claimed just 29 deaths across the whole region.

Even now, those same official statistics insist just 26 people are being treated for the disease.

Alexei Erlikh, a consultant cardiologist who is one of a group of doctors monitoring deaths among colleagues, says most of the 40 Dagestani medics who died were never tested for Covid-19. As a result, they are unlikely to ever be included in official statistics. They do feature in Erlikh’s own memorial list for medical workers, however. That is now up to 311 names nationwide. By contrast, the Ministry of Health reports less than a third of this number.

The cardiologist tells The Independent he is encouraged by the adoption of the new rules. It seems “likely” the change only came about in response to criticism in the western press, he admits. But the reason is not so important: “The crucial thing is we’re past the lies and we’re a step closer to the truth. We can start to make a proper assessment of our response, and the way in Moscow we coped without a major collapse.”

Other specialists are less sure any value could be taken from Russia’s updated statistics.

Michael Favorov, an epidemiologist and former deputy director-general at the UN’s International Vaccine Institute, says any comparison was inappropriate given the differences in data quality. “In time, you might be able to make conclusions for individual countries. But Russia, China, they are manipulating data like there’s no tomorrow.”

Aleksei Kouprianov says that understanding was driving academics like himself to test the numbers as much as they could.

“It’s very bad when authorities manipulate election data,” he says. “But these manipulations are so much more dangerous. Knowing where the truth lies is literally a matter of life and death.”