Thought of the Day - March 22 2021 - Meanwhile in Russia

One country that does not get talked about a lot in the context of COVID, is Russia. In short Russia is really a good news - bad news story.

Vaccines:

We have talked about the various vaccines coming from Russia. The Gamaleya Sputnik V was one of the first announced and today is one of the most widely used vaccines in the world - seeing use in 30 countries. Early in 2021 peer-reviewed analysis showed Sputnik was safe and effective; 92%, up there with the world's best. Russia also has two other vaccine candidates in the works. EpiVacCorona, produced by the Vector Institute in Novosibirsk, and CoviVac, from the Chumakov Centre in St Petersburg, however, these have yet to begin large-scale clinical trials.

That is the good news. The bad news is the reports that while the Sputnik V (note: V means Vaccine not Five) is available to all in Russia, a poll by the Levada Centre found only 30% of Russians are willing to receive the shot. Despite the safety data now being public, this is down by 8% since the rollout began. Russia, although doing a great job marketing the product to other countries, has done a very poor job at home. For example, while politicians around the world, being unable to kiss babies at present, are keen to have their photo taken getting a jab, there are no such pictures of President Vladimir Putin. Indeed, it has been stated he has still not been vaccinated. So despite getting an early start, Russia has only administered a little over 2M vaccines, this is still less than 2% of the population.

Deaths:

Current official COVID death figures in Russia are about 95,000. This puts Russia 56th in the world concerning deaths per capita (651 per million) with COVID. They place only a little higher than Canada (we currently rank 58th).

However, the numbers just don't add up. At the end of 2020, Russian official figures were about 56,000 deaths (lower bar).

Yet if you add up the figures from the ROSSTAT, the Russian state statistics agency, gathered from across the country you get a figure almost three times as high (middle bar). This would mean rather than being 56th, Russia would be one of the worst in the world, right up there with countries like Czechia, Belgium, Hungary and the UK.

Another benchmark to see how accurate official COVID figures are to reality is to compare them to the excess deaths in the country (excess deaths are the number of deaths above the annual average from previous years). For example, in Canada by October 30th, 2020 we were reporting 10,110 deaths from COVID, and excess deaths for the year in 2020 through the end of October state we had 10,090, a remarkable alignment.

Now let's do the same comparison in Russia. If you look at Russia's 2020 excess deaths total versus previous years, the number is a staggering 325,000! This is almost six times the official figure for COVID. Extrapolating to today this could mean deaths from COVID in Russia could be as high as 450,000. And that Russia would be far-and-away the worst-hit country in the world!

Coming full circle, I guess this indicates why the people in Russia do not trust their government. This is the reason that vaccinations are going so slowly. And unfortunately, this is the reason why there is no light at the end of the tunnel at present for them.

Cheers

Cliff