A combination of failures in dealing with the pandemic, statistics under suspicion, slow vaccination and an explosion of cases and deaths from Covid-19 portrays the last months of the pandemic in Russia.
Compounding the picture, unofficial calculations indicate that there may be a huge underreporting of cases and deaths in the country, which suggests that Russia may already be occupying the unpleasant second place in the world list in total number of deaths from Covid-19, perhaps surpassing Brazil and second only to the United States.
Officially, Russian numbers are already high: on January 11, the official Russian Covid-19 control center calculated that there had been a cumulative 10.6 million cases of Covid-19 and 317,600 deaths.
But earlier, on December 30, the Reuters news agency estimated, based on data on excess mortality in the country since the beginning of the pandemic, that the total number of deaths from the new coronavirus would reach 658,000 – double the official data. And there are those who believe that this number could be even higher (see below).
With that, the country would surpass the mark of 620 thousand deaths officially registered so far in Brazil, which is only surpassed in official numbers of deaths by the United States. It is good to remember, however, that several experts point out that the real sum of deaths by Covid-19 in Brazil also probably greatly exceeds that of official data, due to underreporting that occurred mainly at the peaks of the pandemic.
In addition, Brazil is currently experiencing a data blackout and a shortage of Covid-19 tests, which also mask the current stage of the pandemic in the country.
Reuters used as a basis the 835,000 surplus deaths recorded in Russia since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in April 2020.
This excess of deaths – that is, the more people died in a country, compared to the “typical” years before the coronavirus pandemic – has been used by statisticians in different countries (also in Brazil) to estimate underreporting. of deaths amid Covid-19.
The peak of cases in Russia occurred in the last quarter of last year and is still attributed to the delta variant, and now the concerns are with the advancement of the omicron.
But what explains such high and disparate numbers in the country that was the first in the world to approve a vaccine against Covid-19, still in August 2020?
Vaccine resistance with Russian characteristics
The Sputnik V vaccine was announced with great enthusiasm in the first half of the pandemic.
On August 11, 2020, President Vladimir Putin said his country would be the first to give regulatory approval to a coronavirus immunizer, after two months of human testing, which was hailed as a symbol of Moscow’s scientific prowess.
“I know that (the vaccine) works very efficiently, builds strong immunity and, I repeat, has passed all the necessary tests,” Putin said at the time.
A few months later, the Gamaleya research center, responsible for Sputnik V, reported that the vaccine would be 92% effective, with no unexpected side effects — paving the way for a “mass vaccination”. But many outside observers, while stressing that the vaccine does indeed appear to be of good quality, complained about the lack of transparency in the disclosure of immunizer data.
After more than a year, Sputnik V is already exported to more than 70 countries (in Brazil, it did not receive the approval of Anvisa).
And yet, despite the availability of national vaccines, less than 50% of Russians are fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data platform.
In comparison, Brazil, which started its vaccination campaign late, has already vaccinated with two doses more than 67% of the population.
The Russian slowness is due to a resistance to immunization with very peculiar characteristics, not necessarily equal to the “anti-vaccine” outbreaks seen in the West, according to experts.
The technology behind Sputnik V is solid and its international price is competitive, but the lackluster way in which it was presented by the Russian government ended up, inadvertently, discouraging the Russian population from taking the vaccine, evaluates the American researcher Judy Twigg, a professor at the Commonwealth University of Virginia, specializing in global health and Russia and Eurasia.
“There is an anti-vaccine sentiment in Russia that, like the West, comes from many sources: from rumours, from pseudoscience, from doctors spreading disinformation, all of this long before Covid-19. (But), under Putin, there is a segment of the population that doesn’t trust anything that comes from the government — the idea is ‘if the government tells us to do something (like vaccinate), it must be the wrong thing to do'”, Twigg explains to BBC News Brazil.
“And there’s also the suspicion about Sputnik V itself, the idea that Russia could not have created something efficient in that (short) period of time. Many were suspicious because the vaccine was developed quickly, because premature and exaggerated claims were made to regarding safety and efficacy. This caused mistrust”, she adds.
In addition, the researcher assesses, the fact that the Russian government has repeatedly criticized vaccines produced in the West ended up being counterproductive, because it generated even greater resistance among the Russian population against immunization in general.
The BBC’s Russian Service explains that in a country where people are not allowed to protest freely, resisting the vaccine has been seen by some as a way of rebelling against the authorities.
Failures in handling the pandemic
The issue of vaccines is crucial to explain the rise in cases and deaths, but it is not the only one.
Analysts and even locals claim that communication and the strategy to face Covid-19 in Russia was erratic and more oriented to politics than science – with similarities to the Donald Trump administrations in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, evaluates Judy Twigg.
After a lockdown implemented at the beginning of the pandemic, Russia has struggled to convince an important part of its population to wear masks or adhere to social isolation measures and restrictions on spaces and events for vaccinated people.
The Moscow Times explains that, during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the capital Moscow tried to put in place a “passport” that determined that only vaccinated people could go to restaurants. Faced with resistance from these establishments, however, the program was abandoned.
A bill establishing a national vaccine passport via QR code ended up being shelved in December, after being criticized by part of the public opinion.
In November, the Reuters agency interviewed a paramedic in the city of Oryol who said that patients with Covid-19 had been having to wait several hours to be seen by an ambulance.
Dmitry Seregin opined that the low vaccination rate in Oryol was due to problems in official communication about vaccination. “Official communiqués have different information coming from the same people, which makes the people suspicious of the state,” said the paramedic.
For American researcher Judy Twigg, “the government prioritized health policy during the pandemic”.
In 2020, Twigg wrote an article drawing parallels between then US President Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic and that of Vladimir Putin.
“Both faced clear challenges to their power — the impeachment process in the US Congress and opposition to Putin’s attempt to change the Constitution and extend his presidency. And both chose to play down the threat of Covid-19 and think they had it under control with border and flight restrictions early on,” she wrote.
“These measures seemed rigid on paper, but proved porous in practice, ignoring the reality that Covid-19 was already silently advancing on their respective societies. It took a long time for both of them to take testing and other critical responses seriously to being ahead of the pandemic.”
According to Twigg, there are still few Russian leaders, locally or nationally, capable of “actually leading in this pandemic — communicating effectively with the population, doing what needs to be done and convincing people to change their behavior and make the sacrifices.” necessary. And wearing masks is not such a big sacrifice”, he evaluates.
Stats under suspicion
Finally, there is the difficulty in measuring the extent of the damage caused by the coronavirus in Russia.
The data released daily by the Covid-19 confrontation center does not match the excess of deaths made public by the official statistical agency Rosstat (a number that served as the basis for the Reuters agency calculations mentioned at the beginning of the report).
And there are suspicions that the excess of deaths is even higher than Rosstat estimated — and exceeds 1 million.
This calculation was confirmed to BBC Russia by demographer Alexey Raksha, who worked at Rosstat and was fired from the statistical agency in mid-2020, just months after criticizing underreporting in Covid-19 data presented to the public. Other independent media outlets also confirmed these statistics.
“There is a lot of distortion in numbers, simply because no one wants to be held responsible for them”, ponders Judy Twigg, adding that this is common to countries that left the Soviet orbit, “where there is a culture of vertical control that persists to this day, in which no one wants to be the bearer of bad news”.
In addition, says the academic, “in authoritarian countries (as is the case of Russia under Putin), everyone has the antenna on trying to understand what message they should pass on, and then they try to adjust the numbers to that, to fit in. in that message”.
The threat of the omni
All this creates a complex scenario for Vladimir Putin to manage, Twigg continues, at a time when the Russian president is trying to accumulate political capital by being under pressure from the West, actively participating in confrontations in Kazakhstan and in increasing tension with Ukraine.
Putin has urged the public to get vaccinated and said in recent days that Russia has little time to prepare against a new wave caused by the omicron, which is already advancing — especially on unvaccinated Russians.
The Moscow Times reported this week that infections with the omicron had already tripled by the end of the year and could exceed 100,000 a day, according to health officials.
The Gamaleya institute, in turn, stated that Sputnik V is effective against the omicron.
The Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment, at the University of Washington (USA), which makes models to predict scenarios of the pandemic, believes that Russia will face a slightly upward curve of cases until May, with possible new peaks of deaths between February and March. .
An important point, however, is that “the Russian healthcare system, after the initial crisis, has proved to be extremely efficient. The country has shown that it is capable of shifting resources where needed. So it is capable of dealing with that, but it will be under great stress”, evaluates Judy Twigg.
“Considering the pattern of the omicron, it’s possible that most infections are mild or moderate, but we see in the US that hospitalization rates among unvaccinated people are very high. So there’s a lot of room for the omicron to move forward and put enormous pressure on the health system.”
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