27/10/20: COVID19 Update: Russia

 Russia is now in a full-blown second wave of the pandemic with rapidly accelerating daily deaths counts:

Authorities are imposing more severe restrictions on mobility (especially for older members of the public) and are trying to replace older essential workers with younger cohorts. For example, Moscow is trying to roll out substitute teachers (drafted from senior college students) as substitutes for older teaching staff in primary schools. A number of regions (as a federal structure, Russia has highly heterogenous, locally-administered systems) are now running out of emergency health facilities (https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/10/27/were-in-hell-russias-second-wave-of-covid-19-is-catching-the-regions-off-guard-a71851), with serious questions being asked as to the apparent lack of preparedness, given the summer pandemic moderation period. 

Overall, Russia currently ranks 33rd worst in the league of 47 countries with more than 100,000 cases, with better than average (95% confidence interval) scores in the number of cases per 1 million population, deaths per 1 million of population and deaths per 1,000 of cases. Despite the commonly cited controversy over Russian reporting methodologies for COVID19 linked deaths (incidentally, Russia does not use a unique methodology for such reporting, although Russian methods for assigning causes of deaths are different from those used in the EU27), Russian rates of deaths per cases detected and rates of deaths per 1 million of population are comparable (in rankings) to Russia's case numbers. 

Nonetheless, the second wave of the pandemic is both deadlier and larger than the first wave and it remains to be seen if Russian healthcare system can cope with this.