Russia & COVID-19: What went wrong?

With the global novel coronavirus-related death toll increasing in an exponential fashion, quite a lot of nations are finding it extremely difficult to contain the spread of this deadly respiratory illness. One such country would be the Russian Federation, the largest nation in the world.

As of the time of writing, Russia has the third night number of positively identified COVID-19 cases globally (with a suspiciously low death toll). All of this could be attributed to a series of questionable decisions taken on by the current Russian government led by President Vladimir Putin.

The original sin of President Putin in relation to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic would be his initial public denial of the existence of such a viral respiratory illness (this controversial action was motivated by President Putin’s lofty political ambitions). It should be noted that the Russian authorities implemented the necessary lockdown measures pretty late into the dangerous global pandemic.

Putin’s administration initially implemented a government-funded “paid-leave” for all those employed in non-essential industries and services while continuing to downplay the effects of this dangerous strain of novel coronavirus. This soon led to the Russian general public viewing this as a holiday with no relation to the pandemic, and unintentionally contributed to the unchecked spread of the COVID-19 infection across the Russian mainland.

Unlike other similar autocratic world leaders, President Putin took a relatively hands-off approach when it comes to handling this pandemic. Most critical responsibilities were handed over to regional governments, with the Kremlin making sure that reported coronavirus-related death numbers were kept at a minimum, utilizing any and all methods (however questionable) at their disposal.

Due to this decentralized and fundamentally flawed COVID-19 response, there is a strong variation in the quality of data being submitted to the Kremlin. Some regional governments went so far as to cover up a considerable number of coronavirus-related death in Russia (allegedly under the directives of President Putin). Many of these coronavirus-induced deaths were intentionally mis-labelled as pneumonia, with deaths of medical workers being completely omitted.

This controversial (and extremely unethical) governmental practice has led to considerable outcry from both the affected Russian general population and frontline medical workers operating on Russian soil, the later of which created a much more accurate list of all known medical workers killed by the COVID-19 infection (unsurprisingly, 8t was greater than “official numbers”). The situation regarding regional government-endorsed (allegedly) misinformation was bad enough for certain Russian (and international) medical agencies to prefer this independently reported information over “official” sources.

It should that President Putin’s domestic approval ratings have considerable dropped on the basis of his fundamentally flawed COVID-19 response strategy. Ironically, this was the exact opposite of what Putin was working for.