Russia has recorded its largest single day tally of fatalities from the novel coronavirus as the number of new cases reached nearly 6,000.
The country registered 66 deaths from COVID-19 over the past 24 hours, Russian media reported on April 25, bringing the fatality total from the disease to 681.
Russia’s death tally from COVID-19 is very low compared to Western Europe and the United States and has raised questions about whether fatalities are being artificially lowered by ascribing them to other causes, such as pneumonia.
New cases rose by nearly 6,000 over the past 24 hours, lifting the total number of registered cases in Russia to just under 75,000.
Eight children at a Russian military academy in Tver, a town about 180 kilometers from Moscow, have been infected with the disease, the Defense Ministry said in a statement on April 25.
Meanwhile, Dmitry Novikov, a member of the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, said he had contracted COVID-19.
Novikov is the second Communist Party Duma deputy to catch the virus after Leonid Kalashnikov, who is in a hospital with a fever.
Putin’s Future:
So, possibly more than ever before, the future reputation of a leader often described as cultivating an action-man image depends more on action than image.
“The mounting political costs of COVID-19 for the Kremlin are beginning to reveal that its use of dramaturgy, patronage, and coercion to sanctify Putin’s right to rule is decreasingly effective,” the Center for European Policy Analysis wrote in a tweet describing an article by senior fellow Brian Whitmore headlined The Desanctification Of Putin.
Whether Putin is fully aware of the challenge is in doubt, according to critics and observers.
When he first seemed to acknowledge that COVID-19 posed a threat to Russia, after initially playing it down, Putin warned that the country — the governors and the governed — must not rely on luck to see it through the crisis.
But even as confirmed new cases rose by several thousand daily — amid persistent suspicions that the official numbers are a substantial undercount — Putin said in a fireside message to the country on Orthodox Easter on April 19 that the situation is “under complete control.”
Four days later Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who heads a state “task force” appointed to combat COVID-19, warned that the outbreak in Russia had not yet reached a “plateau” or a peak. “We are not even halfway down the road to victory over the coronavirus,” he said.
In a video posted on social media, the chief doctor at a Moscow hospital said that its emergency room was “under pressure. There’s lots of patients,
