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The number of deaths from coronavirus in Russia may be 70% more than official statistics, calculated by the Financial Times. Despite the simplicity of the applied method, it is quite accurate, and an estimate of 70% may turn out to be conservative.
Sergey Smirnov
What happened
The FT compared official April death data in Moscow and St. Petersburg with April averages for five years (2015–2019). The first thing she did back in the weekend was The Moscow Times.
• The excess of mortality in the capitals in April 2020 compared to the historical average was 2073 cases. According to official figures, 629 people died from coronavirus in April in both cities.
• Assuming that the cause of more than 1,400 “additional” deaths was coronavirus and comparing the excess rate only in capitals in April with the official number of virus deaths for the entire pandemic on May 11 in all of Russia (2009 cases), it turns out that there are more real deaths from the disease official at least 72%.
• If we consider Moscow separately, the excess in April will turn out to be three-fold (1841 “additional” deaths at 600 official coronaviruses). In St. Petersburg, the excess is eight-fold (232 versus 29).
The newspaper recalls that Russia is in second place after the United States in terms of the growth rate of infections, but the country’s authorities are making every impression that the situation is under control and ban fakes on coronavirus.
Can you believe the numbers?
The substantiation of such serious conclusions by such a simple calculation caused claims to the methodology of the newspaper. They mainly boil down to the following points:
• The technique is rough, the results are incorrectly interpreted.
• Unaccounted deaths could have been caused not by coronavirus.
• The increase in overall mortality in the context of the coronavirus pandemic is influenced by related, but third-party factors – primarily chronic and acute diseases that have become fatal under conditions of an overload of the health system.
Claims to the methodology
FT itself answered the claims. “Experts believe that statistics on excess mortality provide a more accurate picture of the losses from the pandemic, as it eliminates the differences in the methodology for calculating deaths from coronavirus by country,” the newspaper writes. “So, Professor David Spiegelhalter , Head of the University of Cambridge Risk Research Center, describes this method as“ the only way to correctly compare different countries. ”
In an article, FT specifically cited mortality charts in Russia for all averaged years to show that they differ little from the historical average. But isolated events – such as smog in the summer of 2010 and the coronavirus pandemic – clearly correlate with the rise in the curve of an individual year.
The methodology for assessing victims by excess mortality was used in a well-known study of the results of the abnormal heat in Russia in 2010, conducted by the HSE Institute of Demography and which gave 45 thousand additional deaths. Bloomberg used a similar system to evaluate additional victims associated with coronavirus in New York (there were a third more than official statistics), and The Wall Street Journal compared the course of the pandemic in 17 countries. In Italy, about half the deaths from coronavirus could remain unaccounted for by pandemic statistics, it follows from an analysis of WSJ.
The same methodology was used by Novaya Gazeta for its own assessment of excess deaths in April in Moscow, which practically coincided with the FT estimate (1855 people versus 1841). But the newspaper did not spread the conclusion to the whole of Russia, limiting itself to a quote from experts that “the increase in mortality [in the capital] is large and several times greater than the official number of deaths from coronavirus.” Like FT, the publication emphasizes that excess mortality is the most accurate independent indicator available to statisticians.
Other causes of death
“Some of these [excess] deaths may not be the result of a coronavirus, as people avoid going to hospitals with other diseases,” FT admits. “But the sharpest increase in excess mortality is observed precisely in the regions with the most severe outbreaks, which allows us to directly link most deaths with the virus, and not with the consequences of self-isolation.”
Mortality for some other reasons – including road accidents and work-related injuries – should have been lower in April due to a self-isolation regime, the newspaper notes. In the opposite direction, depression and suicidal mood due to loss of income, as well as an increase in domestic violence should “work” , but there are no statistics on this subject yet.
The registration of coronavirus deaths depends on the final diagnosis at the autopsy, Novaya Gazeta writes with reference to the Ministry of Health. In reality, according to the newspaper, the statistics of those who died from coronavirus include only those whose infection has become the direct cause of death.
In early May, the main freelance pathologist of the Ministry of Health, George Frank, told Echo of Moscow that coronavirus can be interpreted both as a cause of death and as a background. He opposed the inclusion of mortality in patients with complications from other diseases in coronavirus statistics.
Other factors
This is the shakiest part of the FT excess mortality technique. Other mortality factors are difficult to quantify.
The main reason for excess deaths that are not related to coronavirus, apparently, is overloading the system, re-profiling hospitals, diverting attention and capacities from chronic patients and “ordinary” medical care.
All planned hospitalizations have been postponed for the duration of the epidemic in Russia , if the condition of the patient allows. Diabetics and hypertensives are recommended for self-isolation and drug treatment at home.
The media wrote about the extreme discrepancy between the statistics of deaths from coronavirus (533) and excess mortality (9000) in one of the provinces of Ecuador. In addition to a lack of capacity, the reason for this was the complete transfer of all hospitals to the fight against a pandemic.
Talk about it
The first chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko was the first to respond to FT’s publication about Russia . He said that it would be incorrect to consider the alignment of mortality during a pandemic, and the article itself – “it’s just unprofessional hype.”
Later on Tuesday she was commented by the profile vice-premier Tatyana Golikova. “Once again I want to emphasize that the data that I cited yesterday at a meeting with the president regarding the fact that the mortality rate in Russia is 7.6 times lower than in the world as a whole is such. We have never manipulated official statistics, ”she said.
Sergey Smirnov, Writer.
This article was originally published on The Bell.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.
