A Russian Demographer Questioned Government COVID-19 Numbers. He Was Fired Earlier This Month.

7/13/20
In Russia, as in many other countries, the number of coronavirus infections has continued a grim upward march: 733,699 officially confirmed cases as of July 13. The death toll, however, has only crept upward, now totaling 11,439 -- an unusually low figure that the Kremlin and Russian officials credit in part to the government's response to COVID-19. For health demographers like Aleksei Raksha, employed by the state statistics agency Rosstat, something hasn't been right for months, and in May, he spoke out publicly: The low death toll wasn't due to a superior state response, he said, it was due to how coronavirus statistics were being counted. In other words, Russia has been misclassifying COVID-19 deaths. Two months after speaking out, Raksha received what may be official acknowledgment of his contribution to Russia's national discussion about the government's response: He was fired from his job, he said. "It's official. My work at Rosstat is finished," he wrote in a July 3 Facebook post, using wording that implied he believes the decision on his dismissal came from higher up. Russia's coronavirus mortality rate is currently around 1.5 percent. By contrast, the United States' rate is 4.1 percent. Another similar statistic -- deaths per 100,000 people -- shows Russia's rate at just 7.7; the comparable U.S. figure is 41.2.

In interviews with RFE/RL on July 8 and 9, Raksha asserted that Russia's official toll was just one-third of what the actual toll would be, if officials were using a broader classification of attributing mortality to the disease. "I believe that in Russia at the present time at least 30,000 people have died due to the coronavirus," he told RFE/RL's Russian Service. "In general, the statistics on the [Russian official] Stopcoronavirus.ru website raise a lot of questions, I don't trust them, and it's obvious to any specialist that they've all been drawn, forged, fitted, brushed, cropped, aligned and almost completely handcrafted and manipulated," he said. "But we have nothing else, so you need to somehow take [this data], decode it, think it out, and make a guess. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to draw conclusions based on it," he said. As for his dismissal from Rosstat, Raksha said it was "obvious" to him that the agency itself did not make the decision. "It was an idea from above," he told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. Rosstat did not respond to further inquiries from RFE/RL about Raksha's dismissal, and whether it was connected to his public comments.

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