Russia defends its ‘exceptionally precise’ Covid-19 death data

Russian officials have defended the country against claims that its unusually low mortality rate from Covid-19 is suspicious, saying its method of ascribing cause of death is “exceptionally precise”.

Figures released this week have given an inside look into how Russia – which now has the second highest number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the world – tabulates deaths from the disease, a process that differs significantly from many western countries but which Russian health officials have defended as superior.

Russia’s mortality rate is 0.9%, making it an outlier among the countries facing some of the worst outbreaks of coronavirus in the world.

“We never manipulate official statistical data,” said Tatiana Golikova, the country’s top health official, when asked about a Financial Times analysis this week. Officials have also decried a New York Times report on the country’s mortality rate.

As part of its response, Moscow’s health department revealed that more than 60% of deaths of coronavirus patients in the capital were not tallied in the city’s official death count from the disease because an autopsy showed they had died of other causes.

The data would more than double Moscow’s tally from the disease for April if the city counted deaths in the same way as countries such as Spain or Italy, where a positive test result for the deceased is enough to be tallied as a “coronavirus death”. Moscow’s health department defended its methodology on Wednesday as “exceptionally precise”, noting it had performed autopsies on 100% of cases “in contrast to most other countries”.

Either count would still leave Russia far below the US, UK and the hardest-hit western European countries in terms of mortality rates and per capita deaths from the disease so far.

Moscow has ascribed its surprisingly low death toll of 2,305 to a mass testing regime and rapid response to confirmed cases. Meanwhile, Russian officials have publicly bristled at criticism of their methodology or suspicions they are massaging the stats.

Golikova, the health minister, recently claimed that the average fatality rate in the Russian Federation was 7.6 times lower compared with the world average.

The row over data helps illustrate controversies over differing methods of counting deaths from the coronavirus epidemic and shows why academics believe that “excess mortality”, or the number of people who have died above average for a given period, will be the best way to evaluate the toll taken by the virus.

“It is not worth directly comparing [mortality rates] in various countries as they use different methods of classifying the cause of death,” said Tatiana Mikhailova, a senior research fellow at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

There are many reasons for differing mortality rates, experts say, including testing regimes, local rules for coding coronavirus deaths, different national age demographics and stages of the epidemic, hospital capacity, and more.

New data released on Sunday by the Moscow government indicated that the number of deaths in the capital was approximately 18% higher this April than an average of the number of deaths registered that month for the past 10 years.

“This is of course a considerable rise in mortality,” said Vladimir Shkolnikov, a demographer at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, noting that the jump in excess deaths this April was nearly double what would be expected from outbreaks of flu in Moscow in the 2010s.

The Moscow health department statement on Tuesday said that it had tallied 639 coronavirus deaths in April and that more than 60% of coronavirus patients who were determined to have died of other causes. That could indicate that upwards of 1,598 confirmed coronavirus patients died in Moscow in April. Moscow’s excess mortality for the month, based on the 10-year average and the municipal data, was above 1,700 deaths.

That would also match expectations from demographers like Mikhailova, who said that it was “likely most of the excess deaths will be connected with coronavirus and the overload of the medical system directly or indirectly, since no other clear and general cause [of death] for most Muscovites has been noted”.

While that would mark a significant update to the Russian data, it would not upend the international picture of how the virus has struck different countries. As Shkolnikov noted, excess deaths in Moscow appeared considerably lower proportionally than many other hotspots for the disease, including New York and the UK, as well as European cities like Paris, Madrid and Stockholm.

While Moscow, with about half of Russia’s confirmed cases, posted upwards of 1,700 excess deaths in April, New York had posted 24,200 excess deaths between 11 March ans 9 May, a 277% jump, according to the New York Times. And between 14 March and 1 May the UK. had tallied 53,300 excess deaths, a 67% rise.

It is difficult to know where we are in Russia’s epidemic and whether death rates significantly increased in Moscow toward the end of April. National data for Russia will only be available in late May.

According to Shkolnikov, Moscow’s comparatively low excess death rates could either be a result of the late onset of the virus in Russia, meaning mortality may still increase in the coming weeks, or that the country may be trending toward a less severe course of the virus resembling Austria, Finland, Norway and Germany.

While politicians have quickly turned to mortality data to justify or condemn healthcare policies, academics warn that there’s a limit to even what a proper accounting of excess death can show.

“These data do not speak about the effectiveness of the fight against coronavirus, they speak about the effectiveness of the system of current accounting of deaths,” said Mikhailova.