MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s Foreign Ministry has criticized the Financial Times and The New York Times after they reported that Russia’s coronavirus death toll could be much higher than government officials are saying.
This is how Trump will get the CDC to drop the count…in fact, they could drop it to zero, because “the virus doesn’t actually kill you, the effects of pneumonia, heart attack, stroke, etc is what kills you”. To Trump, and all the right wingers who have been regurgitating that nonsense, it feeds their sense that the virus isn’t really a big deal and it’s all these other things killing people…the extra deaths above normal are just a coincidence, you know?
Really, it will take a long time to determine how many people were actually killed by the virus and its effects, but using the excess death count is a good way to get close to the number, and basically every nation with a large case load, even the ones counting carefully, are going to undercount. The difference is when nations like Russia and China disguise the actual numbers for their political ends…it’s sad to see the Republican party doing what nations we have criticized in the past when it comes to accuracy and freedom of information.
Well trump will be tweeting and agreeing with Rusher Rusher Rusher in about 2 minutes
NYT Financial Times FAKE NEWS
You know he will
So you’re telling your populace that the virus is widespread, but fatalities are very rare. That should make Russian citizens take it more seriously.
True brilliance, PootyPoot.
Agreed. First saw this broached in Italy when researchers took a closer look at death rates in Bergamo district viz
Writing in Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera they found there had been 158 deaths in the town in 2020 so far, as opposed to 35 on average in the previous five years. They noted that Nembro had only counted 31 deaths from Covid-19, which looks like an underestimate.
In other towns nearby, including Bergamo itself, the trend seemed identical. The researchers made the point that the only reliable indicator in the end will be “excess deaths” — namely, how many more people have died in total compared to a “normal” year.
Given the level of Trumpian/astroturf gaslighting on top of the weak testing regime and general incompetence of this administration I suspect ‘excess deaths’ is the only way we will get anything close to a real number in the USA.
ETA: Just to keep this on topic, I think it is also a given we will never see anything close from authoritarian governments like Russia’s.
There is a really old joke about the Soviet Union: A man is running through the halls of the Kremlin, shouting “Kruschev is a fool! Kruschev is a fool!” He is arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to thirty years hard labor. Ten years for insulting the Party Chairman and twenty years for revealing state secrets. Not much has changed in 60 years.
NYET! not covid dead. just dead body. we specialize in dead bodies. bodies fall out of window. who knows? could be bad borscht. Vlad says we have run of bad luck. Vlad would not lie.
Maybe Bad tea
Always the Bad tea
It’s kind of like when a Putin critic falls out of a seven story window.
They don’t die from falling, they die from “sudden stop”.
the technical term is Abrupt Stop Syndrome, otherwise known as ASS.
So what they’re saying is that we should multiply the official death toll in major cities by at least 2.5, and other places 3-5…
I find this interesting, because someone obviously wanted to get that number out there, even though it’s in the context of a complaint.
Putin’s playbook has been similar to trump’s - initially downplaying the hazard, then placing responsibility for managing the crisis on district leaders (roughly equivalent to US Governors and Mayors). Unfortunately for the Russian people, loyalty to Putin has been more important for the election of district leaders than management ability.
Now that at least four people in Putin’s close orbit have tested positive for Covid-19 and the deaths mount, Putin is starting to feel the heat. He’s gone, in a few months, from trying to rewrite the Constitution so he can remain in office to being at risk of being overthrown.
To add insult to injury, Putin announced on Monday that social isolation measures were going to be relaxed - in spite of the fact that even the official Russian Covid-19 numbers show cases are still increasing. The last thing Putin wants right now is outsiders confirming what Russians already suspect - things are worse than reported and that Putin is pandering to the oligarchs (and his own interests) by opening too soon.
[Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Construction Minister Vladimir Yakushev, Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova, and Putin’s top aide Dmitry Peskov have all tested positive - that we know of]
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova complained about what she called “disinformation” by the two newspapers and said letters demanding a retraction would be passed on to both on Thursday.
So the story is confirmed, then.
Even multiplied by two or three the ratio of cases to deaths seems remarkably out of line with that in the US and Western European countries. While Russia’s per capita test rate is quite high, higher than the US for instance, that would’t seem enough to explain the discrepancy.
It’s obvious what is going on here. The vodka is curing the virus, but they are dying from alcohol poisoning. Problem solved.
As a long term lab rat (with some QC), sometimes the “test” isn’t worth a damn, and always generates positive numbers for TPTB.
Republicans might not trust government, but there’s just something about the cut of Putin’s jib that gives them a chubby.
More Russian collusion…
“That’s why post-mortem diagnoses in Moscow and causes of death, in the end, are exceedingly accurate, and the mortality data absolutely transparent,” the statement said.
The only things more “transparent” than mortality stats in Russia are the building windows that doctors keep falling through.
What are they gonna do…throw the journalists out of a hospital window?