Coronavirus has devastated Moscow. Now it's spreading across Russia's 11 time zones to ill-funded regions

Russia hit a grim Covid-19 milestone this week: According to Johns Hopkins University, the country now ranks second in the world for confirmed coronavirus cases.


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The Russian capital has been the hardest hit. Of Russia's total of 281,752 confirmed cases, over half -- 142,824 -- are in Moscow, the country's coronavirus headquarters said Sunday. But the virus is now spreading across Russia's regions, an enormous landmass that covers 11 time zones and includes some of the country's most remote and impoverished places.

In a video conference meeting on Monday with Russia's 85 regional heads, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the burden would fall to local leaders to decide whether to continue lockdown measures or to begin cautiously lifting restrictions to reopen the economy.

"We have a big country," he said. "The epidemiological situation varies across the regions. We factored this in before, and now at the next stage, we have to act even more specifically and carefully."

According to official statistics, the pandemic has reached all of Russia's constituent parts, from the Kaliningrad exclave between Poland and Lithuania to the remote Chukotka autonomous okrug, across the Bering Strait from Alaska.

Russia's regions are also starting to report their own numbers, sometimes showing a disparity between the nationally published statistics on mortality and infections published on the stop coronavirus.rf portal and on local government websites.

Kaliningrad region, for instance, reported 13 deaths as of Friday, while the nation's coronavirus headquarters reported 11.

The contrast between national and local mortality figures was even starker in Chelyabinsk region in the Ural mountains: Local authorities there reported 10 Covid-19-related deaths in addition to the six deaths attributed directly to coronavirus on the national portal.

Russian Vice-Premier Tatiana Golikova told Russian news outlets this week that the Russian government has not manipulated statistics, but Russia's mortality figures have become a political football. Observers have noted the comparatively low overall number of deaths in Russia -- a total that currently stands at 2,631, according to the country's coronavirus headquarters -- even as the country takes second place in the world for the number of confirmed cases, behind the United States.

In Moscow, health officials hit back at media reports that it was underreporting Covid-19 fatalities, saying its data was "absolutely open." But the city's health department also acknowledged that it only counts deaths that were found through post-mortem autopsy to have been caused directly by coronavirus complications.
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It's struck Russia real hard...


Just a virus causing damages when everyone anticipated nukes to be the next in line

Khayceeofficial:
It's struck Russia real hard...


Just a virus causing damages when everyone anticipated nukes to be the next in line

the whole thing is really devastating