Here’s a poser for you: The Russian Federation has the third highest recorded cases of COVID-19 in the world, right up there on the dais with the US and Brazil.
But when we get to deaths from COVID-19, the country run by Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin with a population of 114 million people sits on a lowly 13th behind Pakistan, Chile, Mexico, Italy, Peru, Iran, Italy, Germany etc.
Earlier this week, in my general internet rummaging I came across a news item, a blip really, a report of less than 100 words which revealed that the Russian Republic of Dagestan in the northern Caucasus has recorded over 600 deaths due to pneumonia in the last two weeks.
But the official death toll from COVID-19 in the province is 36.
Now that is a conundrum, the sort of baffling riddle that a small army of theoretical logisticians could muse over for years, scratching their over-educated bonces and furrowing their brows before coming up with three theories all of which were wrong.
Is Russia’s public health system better than that of Germany? Has it developed a comprehensive testing system that isolates COVID-19 positives and quarantines them? Does it have a track and trace program that prevents spot fires of infection?
The answer to all of the above is no.
Russian officials claim every one of those 600 pneumonic deaths in Dagestan is not COVID-19 related viral pneumonia but another kind or indeed kinds of pneumonia that have sprung up out of the blue and infected large numbers of Dagestanians.
The old propaganda trick
What are the odds, eh?
Of course, what we can surmise, what is plainly obvious is Putin’s Russia has pulled the old Soviet propaganda trick, especially useful in times of pandemic: Call it something else and it becomes something else.
Putin’s Russia has a low COVID-19 death count because it doesn’t count most of the COVID-19 deaths.
These lies are being told across Russia as we speak. And they are being told because Vladimir Putin will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent any criticism, any groundswell of discontent based on the compelling view that his government is incapable of protecting its own citizens and that the middling economic power is on the verge of catastrophic collapse.
The Chinese government under Xi Jinping has lied its way through the pandemic from its Genesis both to its own people and to the world. Like Putin in Russia, Xi in China has reached back to the past and used every trick in the communist playbook to avoid scrutiny.
While we can’t be certain about the figures released by each country, especially in totalitarian regimes, the current top three in COVID-19 mortality sees the US coming in first, Brazil second with a bullet (it is expected to surpass the US in COVID-19 mortality by mid-July) and the United Kingdom third.
Unenviable top 3
Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson.
All are right wing populists in parliamentary democracies. We have a right-wing government in power federally in this country and under Scott Morrison, it has done a hell of a job. We’ve had 102 COVID-19 deaths, 77th on the global list. By any measure that is a fine result.
So, this is not a matter of ideology.
The common theme here is Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and to an extent Boris Johnson are terrible public administrators given to ignoring fact, data and science and going with their instincts which in the case of this pandemic have all been wrong. They failed to respond to the looming threat and were ill-equipped to deal with when it started killing people in number.
On the day Liverpool FC played Atletico Madrid at a packed Anfield Stadium (capacity 54,000), Denmark locked its country down. Italy had done so two days earlier. While a quarter of a million poured through the turnstiles at the four-day steeplechase event at Cheltenham, Spain had begun its lockdown. France followed three days later.
Late lockdowns
It was not until a week after that, on March 23 that the UK went into lockdown. It continued receiving flights into the country with no quarantine requirement for another month. Its track and trace program of infections is a laughable joke. Its testing of the population, an abject administrative failure. There were shortages of personal protective equipment and those failures led to the unnecessary deaths of health workers.
These failings were all seen in the US and Brazil, too. Johnson might avoid some of the criticism because he fell to COVID-19 himself, leaving his government flailing about but Bolsonaro called COVID-19 “a cold”. Trump regarded it as no worse than the flu and suggested researchers look at bleach and blasts of ultraviolet light as treatments. Both men supported the use of hydroxychloroquine which the FDA revoked the emergency use of on Monday having found the malarial treatment showed “no benefit for decreasing COVID-19 death or speeding recovery.”
Brazil’s failure
Bolsonaro had two health ministers resign over his failure to even support basic preventative measures like social distancing.
All three countries hit infection rates of 2.8 in April, that is, 100 people infected would in turn infect 280 more. Those numbers have all declined but failures of testing mean all three countries have little or no understanding of the degree of community infection. They are rolling the dice on a second wave without having yet seen off the first one.
In the US, while infections in deaths and recorded cases in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have declined the numbers of recorded cases in its three most populous states – Texas, California and Florida are alarming.
Brazil’s economy is set to decline by eight per cent in the next year. Deloitte’s estimate the US economy has shrunk by 17 per cent in the first two quarters of this year. The UK dropped two per cent in GDP in the first quarter of the calendar year with another six per cent or more decline to come in the current quarter.
That’s a lot of pain for no gain. To be fair those figures will be replicated by countries who did lock down, who did promote social distancing, did create processes for testing large numbers of citizens and implemented track and trace programs.
What the top three have is all the economic misery with a big pile of dead bodies.
There is a solid argument that Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson along with Putin and Xi are politically at least, the world’s hardest men. They scheme and plot away for their own advancement, to enhance their own reputations and tighten their grip on power. It is something of an irony that these men, all bluff and bluster, have been brought to heel by a simple organism that can only be seen under an electron microscope.
There is some difference. Putin and Xi are the beneficiaries of the totalitarian states they lead.
It’s easier for them. They can hide their dead.
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