"I would like to stress once again that the information I relayed yesterday at a meeting with the president regarding the case fatality rate being 7.6 times lower in Russia than globally is true. And we never manipulated the official statistics," Golikova told a briefing.
On Monday, the Financial Times newspaper reported that, according to its analysis, the total number of coronavirus-related fatalities in Russia could be 70 percent higher than the government’s official data show. According to the official figures, 629 people died from COVID-19 in April in Moscow and St. Petersburg, while the newspaper said that a total of 2,073 people died in the two cities, which is 72 percent more than the average number over the past five years — 1,841 people in Moscow and 232 in St. Petersburg.
As of Tuesday, Russia has registered 10,899 new COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the total count to 232,243 and making the country second in the global number of cases, behind the United States. Meanwhile, the death toll in Russia has increased by 107 to 2,116, and the total number of recoveries has risen by 3,711 to 43,512.
Other nations with a similar count of COVID-19 cases have a significantly higher death toll. For example, Spain has over 227,000 cases, including 27,700 deaths, while the United Kingdom has more than 224,000, with over 32,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Centre.
