JRL NEWSWATCH: “Russian excess deaths over summer outstrip COVID toll by more than 3 to 1” – Reuters/ Maria Tsvetkova
“The number of excess deaths in Russia between May and July was more than three times higher than the official coronavirus toll, recent government data show, a discrepancy some experts say raises questions about the accuracy of Moscow’s counting. … [D]ata released by … Rosstat … show … 57,800 excess deaths between May and July, … peak of the outbreak. … calculated … comparing fatalities over those three months in 2020 with the average number of May-July deaths between 2015 and 2019. Alexei Raksha, a demographer who worked for Rosstat until this summer, said the jump … illustrated the real [Covid-19] toll … that authorities had reported only some of the deaths publicly. …”