At least 300,000 more people died last year during the coronavirus pandemic than were reported in Russia’s most widely cited official statistics.
Not all of those deaths were necessarily from the virus. But demographers see “excess deaths” as the most accurate way to assess the virus’s overall toll. By that measure, the pandemic killed about one in every 400 people in Russia, compared with one in every 600 in the U.S. For much of the last year, Russia has appeared more focused on the public-relations and economic aspects of the pandemic than on fighting the virus itself, but the deaths are an open secret.