More than 87,500 people with COVID-19 died in November in Russia, the highest monthly number since the start of the pandemic, the state statistics agency reported.
According to the Rosstat report, 71,187 deaths were direct and confirmed cause of COVID-19, 8,939 deaths were possibly due to the virus without confirmation with a test, in 1,477 cases the virus significantly aggravated the fatal complications of other diseases and 5,924 people gave positive for the virus but died of other causes.
The increase comes amid low vaccination rates and poor enforcement of coronavirus restrictions. Only 51% of Russia’s nearly 146 million people are fully vaccinated, even though the country developed and approved the Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19 months before the rest of the world.
Russia has faced a wave of infections in recent months with record numbers of infections and deaths. The situation has improved in recent weeks, but authorities are now preparing for a new wave of infections due to the omicron variant.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, who heads the state special unit for coronavirus, said Russia’s overall mortality increased 17% in November from a year earlier, a growth she attributed to COVID-19.
Russia reported 21,073 new cases and 926 deaths on Friday. The special unit has recorded almost 10.5 million confirmed infections and 307,948 deaths during the pandemic.
According to Rosstat, the total deaths related to the virus between April 2020 and October 2021 was almost 626,000, more than double the number that the state special unit for the coronavirus has reported to date.
The Russian authorities have attributed the discrepancies in the released figures on deaths to the fact that the special unit only includes deaths in which COVID-19 was the main cause, and uses information from medical facilities. Rosstat uses a broader criterion in its counting system and takes the figures from the civil registry.
The Russian population fell by about 945,100 inhabitants in the January-November period, and the decline could exceed one million this year.
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