Covid-19: With 660k deaths, Russia’s population falls by 1m in 2021
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The long-term effects of the pandemic have begun to unfold: in Russia, where Covid-19 claimed 660,000 lives so far, the population has declined by one million in 2021 alone.
The Russian Federation’s relentlessly shrinking population, which was 145 million in 2021 (1.87 percent of the total world population), has been at the top of President Vladimir Putin’s domestic agenda since he came to power over two decades ago, the media reported on Saturday. The headcount further declined by over one million people in 2021, a historic drop not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, according to media reports.
The report came amid the current Russian-Ukraine crisis, which potentially threatened world peace and the global economy.
Covid-19 has exacerbated Russia’s demographic woes. Rosstat, the statistics agency, said over 660,000 people had died with coronavirus in the country since 2020. These numbers showed a downward trend from the previous year (2019) when Russia’s population fell by more than half a million.
The number of pandemic-related fatalities, published monthly by Rosstat, are far higher than death figures released by a separate government website, which only considered fatalities caused by the coronavirus as the primary cause of death after an autopsy, and shows just 329,443 pandemic-related deaths. The virus as the secondary cause of deaths of patients suffering from co-morbidities has not been taken into account.
In fact, various governments the world over have been accused of downplaying fatalities this way. Clearly, downtrends in world population growth will pick up as and when similar discrepancies emerge in other countries as well.
The discrepancy triggered the Russian Opposition’s charges that the Putin government downplayed the severity of the pandemic in Russia, one of the worst-hit countries by cases in the world.
Russia has been struggling to curb Covid-19. But its vaccination drive, despite Sputnik vaccines being the first to roll out in the world in 2020, has been slow, restrictive measures remained limited, and the people avoided mask-wearing in public places.
The pandemic death toll has stressed the demographic crisis, linked to low birth rates and a shorter life expectancy Russia has faced for the past 30 years.
The birth rates have been falling because the generation now becoming parents were born in the 1990s when the birth rate plunged because of economic uncertainties after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The number of births per woman in Russia stands at around 1.5, well short of the minimum of 2.1 necessary to renew the population.
