Posted on 03/21/2020 8:27:08 PM PDT by hapnHal
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread around the world, there are growing questions in Russia about the official number of cases that have been declared.
According to the count released by its health ministry, Russia currently has only 253 confirmed cases of the virus. That is vastly lower than in other major countries in Western Europe, where there are already thousands of cases.What really makes Russia an outlier, however, is the number of tests it is carrying out compared to its number of positive cases.
Russia has done 133,101 tests, putting it behind only China, Italy and South Korea.But with just 306 cases of the virus, Russia’s ratio of positive cases to the number of tests is the second lowest in the world, at 0.21%.
Only the tiny United Arab Emirates comes lower at 0.11%, based on figures from the Our World In Data project at Oxford University.NYC now 'epicenter' of coronavirus crisis, mayor says; 258 dead in USThat number is puzzling, not least for a country of Russia’s vast size, with a population of 144 million and a long border with China.
For example, the U.K. has done 64,600 tests and has over 3,000 cases. In Norway, 44,000 tests have turned up 1,700 cases.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Potatoe Vodka is a prophylactic fluid?
The fact that these newsies appear perplexed about information that comes out of totally unreliable nations is amazing.
IT IS ALL F**KING FALSE !!
I never heard them complain about China.
Like Ida Amin frequently stated "They died in a traffic accident".
Russia shut down their border to China. That’s why.
President for Life Putin is a savior in his own mind having no requirement of accounting.
Notice Russia is suspect by MSM avoids taking China to task for hiding the truth, refusing to allow our CDC in to investigate, and we are supposed to believe China’s numbers.
Putin closed all their borders, starting with the border to China. A hard closure
He did this many weeks ago
ISNT it interesting how our media loves communist China, but hates Christian, non communist Russia?
In Russia virus doesn’t kill Russian, Russian kills virus.
[I never heard them complain about China.]
Nonetheless, there is some smoke, even based on the shoestring resources Western journalists have devoted to Russia’s bug situation. For one thing, Russia’s covid-19 test is 1/16 as sensitive:
According to PCR News, the Russian test is based on the same method used by other countries.
But the Russian test, PCR News wrote, only detects the virus when there are over 100,000 copies of it per milliliter in a sample. That is far more than in other countries’ tests. A test in use in the U.S., for example, will pick up the virus with just 6,250 copies.
“That would mean it’s about 10-16 times less sensitive than what’s available in the U.S.,” Carmen Wiley, president of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry, told ABC News by a phone. At such a level, she said there was a risk the Russians were missing cases, in particular where people were asymptomatic. ]
Those concerns have been fueled by figures from Russia’s state statistics agency that show Moscow has experienced a surge in recorded pneumonia cases this year. Data from the agency Rosstat showed Moscow had 6,921 pneumonia cases in January, an increase of 37% from last year.
Moscow’s health department then released its own figures showing cases in January were actually 8% lower. But Rosstat told Reuters it did not understand how the Moscow department could have reached that result.
Vladimir Cherpunov, a leading virologist at the Novosibirsk institute, known as Vektor, that is leading the government testing effort, two weeks ago told The Siberian Times that he could not understand why all pneumonia patients were not being tested.
“All these cases are now ascribed to seasonal flu,” Cherpunov said. “That means that maybe the web is not cast very wide.”
Vasilyeva said her group has been receiving complaints from doctors describing wards already overflowing with pneumonia patients and saying that they are forbidden from putting pneumonia as the cause on death certificates. She released an audio recording she said was from a doctor at Moscow’s Mukhin hospital, who said that 240 beds have now been set aside for patients with severe “pneumonia.” ]
Yes, the rumor is alcoholics are immune to the Chinese Communist Party Wuhan Kung Flu...which is pretty much every adult in Russia.
/sarc
[ISNT it interesting how our media loves communist China, but hates Christian, non communist Russia?]
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Russia did well by closing the border early and is now just reporting low numbers and keeping their economy moving.
You laugh but I was a drunk for 20 years and never got the flu. The year I quit I got so sick I thought I was going to die. Anecdotal yes but true.
Russia is our enemy not because of its religion, but because of its world-conquering etho
Russia is not our enemy.
I never heard MSM complain about China’s testing methods or reporting methods. I may have missed it if they did. Seems like they swallow the figures as facts in every story I’ve seen.
[Russia is not our enemy.]
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article177744986.html
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/03/02/postulating-covid-19-a-weapon-against-china/
Frankly a lot of Veterans Today is recycled Soviet and Tsarist propaganda. As Richard Pipes, the old Kremlinologist once said, the problem with the Soviet Union wasn’t Communism, but the fact that it was Imperial Russia with a Red veneer. Without Imperial Russia’s world-conquering ethos, no one would care, as long as Russians kept their butchery within their borders. Unfortunately, the Russians had to attempt to expand their borders. That’s ultimately what Russia’s issues with its neighbors have been all about - its relentless lust for new lands to annex.
BTW, I’ve been following Veterans Today since for almost 20 years, pretty much since the website started up. I posted the McClatchy thing just to provide a 3rd Party assessment. The Oxford academics quoted by McClatchy filled in some of the blanks on where VT got their pre-written essays, many of which had this really foreign-sounding perspective and verbiage.
“It certainly acts like our enemy, by spreading disinformation against us”
Yes, that’s what Hillary, Schiff and the Democrats say. Russiagate!
Wodka.
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