Russia’s Covid-19 death toll could be 3 times higher
After months of questions over the true scale of the coronavirus crisis in Russia, the state statistical agency reported over 200,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 — more than three times as high as officially reported.
This is still far lower than the U.S. toll, but it does mean that Russia has suffered more fatalities than European countries like Italy, France and Britain, whose poor records have been regularly cited by Russian state media as proof of Russia’s relative triumph.
The gap between the official death rate and the real one is largely explained by Russia’s practice of recording a death as coronavirus-related only in cases where an autopsy has confirmed the virus as the main cause.
Context: The latest figures come as the public remains skeptical about Russia’s vaccine, hailed by President Vladimir Putin. Only 38 percent say they plan to get vaccinated.
Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.
In other developments:

■ Nearly half of England is under the strictest lockdown measures, but the country is still shattering virus records. There were 53,135 new cases reported on Tuesday, the highest figure yet on a single day. More than 20,000 people are hospitalized, more than at the peak of the pandemic in April.

■ The pandemic has caused the highest number of excess deaths in the Netherlands since World War II, the country’s national statistics bureau said on Tuesday.

■ Dozens of research papers published over the past few months have found that people who carried a bigger load of the coronavirus became seriously ill more often and were more likely to die, compared with those who carried much less virus.
The New York Times