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The legs of a lifeless body hang on a stretcher in a hospital, as coronavirus sufferers fight for their lives just meters away. An elderly woman can barely breathe, in a desperate gasp, this being the gloomy background in one of the many disturbing videos shot with a cellphone in Russian hospitals.
“This is how our nights are: horrible”says a male voice speaking CNN resumed. A medical union associated with the Russian opposition – the “Alliance of Doctors” – said the video was recorded in mid-October by medical staff at a hospital in Ulyanovsk, a city about 700 kilometers east of Moscow.
“Two more in our section”, the man says, as he points the camera at a corpse. “This is how Covid-19 kills everyone.”
The scary video is just one of many obtained by CNN, which reveals the dire conditions inside the overcrowded hospitals. Some images captured in the morgues show naked bodies, piled on top of each other on dirty floors, the scenes reminiscent of war zones rather than hospitals.
The clip, available in CNN material
As Russia struggles to control the pandemic, the clips raise questions about the actual death toll, assuming it would be much higher than official figures suggest.
Russia says more than 33,000 people have died from Covid-19 by November 16. But this number is disputed by Kremlin critics who say the authorities do not report all the figures.
“I think the real number is around 130,000 people. “, declared Alexey Raksha, a former government statistician, who made estimates based on official data on the total number of deaths, compared with data recorded in previous years.
Using data from local registries, Raksha estimates that Russia has reached around 160,000-170,000 more deaths from April to November. It attributes around 80% of these deaths to Covid-19, an average number highlighted by similar statistics published by Western countries.
Between April and September 2020, Russia’s official excess mortality figure was about 117,000 more deaths than last year, according to Rosstat, the Russian statistics agency. The official death toll of Covid-19 for this period is around 21,000 people.
Rosstat data for October and November are not yet available, but given the official data reported, the spread of the pandemic has accelerated.
Raksha says he stepped down from Rosstat in July after making critical public statements about how the agency counts coronavirus-related deaths. He says the discrepancy between the official figures and his calculations is huge.
Russia has surpassed 2 million cases of COVID-19
The number of new coronavirus infection cases in Russia on Thursday exceeded 2 million, amid a wave of new infections and deaths in recent months, the DPA informs.
Russia currently ranks fifth on the list of countries with the highest number of COVID-19 cases, with a total of 2,015,608 cases, according to a federal monitoring service that provides daily statistics.
Thursday’s service reported a record increase in the daily death toll, 463, and new cases, to over 23,000.
In total, Russia has recorded around 35,000 deaths directly associated with the novel coronavirus. The death toll does not include people who contracted the virus but died from other causes.
President Vladimir Putin has rejected the possibility of imposing new blockade measures, after such measures devastated the Russian economy earlier this year.
Putin described the coronavirus situation as “complicated but controllable” this week in a meeting with senior officials, according to a transcript provided by the Kremlin.
Russian federal authorities have ordered masks and gloves to be worn in all crowded public areas and advised seniors and people at high risk of the disease not to leave their homes unless absolutely necessary.
Publisher: DC
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