Russian Doctors Distrust Official Covid-19 Numbers, Poll Shows

(Bloomberg) -- About half of Russian doctors don’t trust the country’s official Covid-19 statistics, according to a new survey, amid suspicions that the government is under-reporting the scale of the coronavirus outbreak.

The real number of cases is higher than the official one, 49% of doctors said, according to the poll. Only 23% said the statistics are accurate, while 9% said the reported numbers overstate the reality. The death toll looked unreliable to 47% of doctors.

Of the 60% of doctors surveyed who treated Covid-19 patients, a higher number -- 54% -- believed the official number of cases understates the reality.

The poll, first reported by the Vedomosti newspaper, was conducted June 8-17 among 502 doctors by a team of researchers from the Moscow-based Levada Center and Public Opinion Foundation for the ESOMAR Got Talent contest.

With almost 700,000 reported Covid-19 cases -- ranking fourth in the world -- and 10,494 deaths, the Russian coronavirus mortality rate is 1.5%, relatively low compared to the global one of 4.7%. Some Russian regions such as the capital Moscow have reported significantly higher mortality rates by including people diagnosed with the virus whose deaths were officially determined to be from other causes.

“Opinion polls have already shown that Russians have little trust in the official coronavirus statistics,” Stepan Goncharov, a pollster at Levada, said by phone. “Doctors are the most well informed as they are people who have had direct experience of the pandemic and they too are skeptical about the data.”

A spokesperson for the government’s virus-response staff didn’t respond to a request for comment on the poll.

Russian officials defend the figures as accurate, noting that the death count is based on detailed autopsies. But the World Health Organization has also questioned Russia’s death rate.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.