November was the deadliest month of the pandemic in COVID-19 in Russia, which deepens the demographic crisis that President Vladimir Putin has described as a threat to the future of the country.
Last month, there was a record 87,527 deaths associated with the virus, according to data released by the Federal Statistical Service on Thursday night. That’s a 16% increase from the previous month and brings the total of COVID-19-related deaths in Russia to more than 625,000 since the start of the pandemic.
“Life expectancy in Russia has regressed a decade,” said Vera Karpova, a demographer at Moscow State University who estimates that COVID-19 has reduced average life expectancy by more than three years to less than 70. “The latest The time life expectancy was 70 was in 2012. “
Russia had a record number of cases last month amid a stubbornly low vaccination rate, despite the wide availability of a free domestic vaccine. That’s even before officials have reported any significant presence in Russia of the much more contagious omicron variant.
About 62% of Russians have herd immunity either from inoculation or by recovering from the virus, according to the government’s COVID-19 reporting center.
Putin said last week at his end-of-year press conference that the drop in life expectancy in the world’s largest country was a threat to Russia’s geopolitical position and its economy amid a growing shortage of hand labor. construction site.
“I have mentioned the regrettable decline in life expectancy and increased mortality that we are seeing, and it is compounding one of our biggest problems,” Putin said. “From a humanistic and geopolitical point of view, a population of 146 million in such a large country is completely inadequate.”
In November, mortality increased 17% compared to the same month last year, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday night, citing Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova. In the first 29 days of December, mortality fell 19.6% compared to the same period last month, with covid-19 being the leading cause of death, Golikova noted, citing preliminary data.
Russia reports full data on deaths from the virus with a substantial delay. The November figures were 2.4 times higher than the daily estimates from the COVID-19 reporting center.
The number of new daily infections reported in Russia has nearly halved since its peak in early November, even as the omicron variant has pushed the case count to record highs in countries like the US, UK. and France.
The variant has yet to become dominant in Russia, Anna Popova, head of the government’s public health watchdog, told a summit of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States in St. Petersburg on Tuesday.
The excess death toll in Russia points to a higher number of COVID-19 victims than the revised figures show, said Dmitry Kobak, a researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
“By the end of the year, there will be more than 1 million victims of covid” since the outbreak broke out, he said. While there appear to be significantly fewer deaths in December than last month, “they will total nearly 700,000 in 2021,” he said.
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