(ATHENS) — Firefighters are working to extinguish dozens of fires across Greece, where over 100 wildfires have started in the past day.
In the town of Evia, 90 miles from Athens, the Greek coast guard and private-owned boats are evacuating people from the beach where residents and tourists fled the flames. According to the Athens News Agency, 90 people have been transported to safety so far.
Greece is facing what has been described as its worst heat wave in more than three decades.
Greece’s Civil Protection Chief Nikos Hardalias said 118 wildfires broke out over the past 24 hours in the country. An EU disaster response group said firefighters and water-dropping planes were being sent to Greece, as well as Italy, Albania and North Macedonia, where fires have also broken out.
“Following the situation with great concern,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted. “European solidarity is at work to fight these terrible fires.”
More than 500 firefighters, 150 vehicles, five aircraft and nine water-dropping helicopters have been mobilized, as well as several groups of volunteers.
Thousands were evacuated in several suburbs north of Athens, including in the town of Varympompi, where several properties were burnt to the ground. Firefighters sprayed water on burned cars and metal structures to prevent another fire from starting.
“A lot of people were scared,” Alex, a volunteer firefighter, told ABC News. “We saw houses after houses burnt, there’s a lot of damage.”
The Hellenic Army is assisting with foot patrols and airborne firefighting assets.
An initial calculation by the National Observatory of Athens indicates that between Aug. 1 and Aug. 4, around 14,826 acres were burned in Greece’s wildfires. That’s more than 50% of the area burned in entire fire seasons of previous years: 25,639 acres burned during the 2020 fire season in Greece, and 23,240 acres burned in 2019.
Athens saw temperatures climb as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday and nearly 108 on Wednesday.
“It’s hell … unbelievable,” said Varympompi resident Vasilis Michelas, who lost his vintage car workshop in the fires. “Thirty-five years … it’s all gone.”
Authorities reported no serious injuries. An assessment of the damage caused so far is yet to be completed, but the national grid operator has warned that the capital’s power supply could be “endangered” after part of the transmission system shut down.
Now, the danger is that the blaze could reach archeological sites in the western Peloponnese. Greek authorities ordered evacuations in the nearby villages, according to Reuters.
(New York) — The availability of food and how crops will fare as a result of climate change has long been of interest to environmental researchers, but scientists are now finding other threats to food supplies that can severely impact global food security.
Climate change may pose an increased risk for crops to become infected with pests and pathogens, leaving the yields inedible and risking quantities of the world’s food supply, according to a study published Thursday in Nature Climate Change.
Researchers at the University of Exeter in England studied models for the production of four major commodity crops — maize, wheat, soybean and rice — as well as eight temperate and tropical crops, to predict how the crops would respond to future climate scenarios.
The researchers found that, overall, the yield of the crops will increase at high latitudes, such as North America and parts of Europe and Asia. However, the findings also suggest that risk of infection from 80 fungal and oomycete, or fungal-like, pathogens will increase at high latitudes as temperatures increase, according to the paper.
As global temperatures warm, pest outbreaks are common, and pathogens can more easily attack crops, scientists said. Temperature is a “major determinant” of disease risk, and global distribution of plant pathogens have already shifted with the current warming, according to the study.
Climate change will not only affect the number of pathogens able to infect crops, but the composition of how the pathogens are assembled as well, the scientists said.
The higher temperatures also pose the possibility of major shifts in species composition within pathogen communities in some regions, such as the United States, Europe and China.
Food scarcity is a “continuous concern” as global populations expand, the amount of arable land decreases and the threat of climate change increases.
The researchers concluded that plant pathogens represent a “major threat” to crop production and food security, which reinforces the need for “careful crop management.”
(CALIFORNIA) — For her 40th birthday, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, launched a mentorship initiative for women re-entering the workforce after losing their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The campaign — from the duchess’ nonprofit foundation, Archewell, which she founded with husband Prince Harry — is named 40×40 and is meant to encourage people around the world to give 40 minutes of their time to support women going back to work.
“In reflecting on my 40th birthday and the many things I am grateful for, I’m struck that time is among our greatest and most essential gifts: Time with our loved ones, time doing the things we love, time spent learning, laughing, growing, and the sacred time we have on this earth,” Meghan wrote. “Amongst the most valuable gifts of time is also time spent in service to others knowing that it can contribute to incredible change.”
“To that last point, and with my 40th lap around the sun in mind, it made me wonder: What would happen if we all committed 40 minutes to helping someone else or to mentoring someone in need?” she continued. “And then what would happen if we asked our friends to do the same?”
The duchess went on to note that “tens of millions of women around the world have left the workforce” due to COVID-19, “including over 2 million in the U.S.” She also noted that “the latest research shows that fewer women than men will regain work” as society rebounds from the pandemic.
“I believe mentorship is one way to help women regain confidence and rebuild their economic strength,” Meghan added.
“The time that you donate can contribute to a global wave of service and set in motion meaningful impact in our own communities, and across the world,” she concluded.
Meghan asked 40 activists, athletes, artists and world leaders to join her in donating 40 minutes of mentorship. Among those who have agreed to participating include Adele, Amanda Gorman, Amanda Nguyen, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Gloria Steinem, José Andrés, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and Stella McCartney.
For more information on 40×40, including how you can get involved, visit the Archewell site.
(LONDON) — The British government recorded a drop in COVID-19 cases for the fifth day in a row Tuesday. Daily deaths rose slightly to 138, but for almost a week had been under 100.
It’s a far cry from public warnings earlier in summer, when the country’s newly minted Health Secretary Sajid Javid warned the nation of the possibility of 100,000 daily cases.
Despite those warnings, the government lifted all remaining restrictions on social distancing and mandated mask-wearing in England on July 19. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “Freedom Day” was criticized as an irresponsible move in the midst of a third wave driven by the highly transmissible delta variant. “A murderous policy,” said Dr. Gabriel Scally, a leading public health expert at the University of Bristol. “Epidemiological stupidity,” a World Health Organization official said.
But then, cases dropped by around 40%, and deaths and hospitalizations have stayed low, despite the ending of all restrictions — and the world has been baffled as to why.
Many are pointing to the high vaccination rate in the U.K. More than 72% of all adults have received their full dose of vaccination, and the Office for National Statistics recently announced it estimated that 92% of the population in England has antibodies, either through vaccination or through previous infection of COVID-19.
Some experts, such as King’s College London professor of genetic epidemiology Tim Spector, have called foul on the data. Spector suggested in an interview with Sky News that the sudden drop in cases — “unheard of in pandemics” — was likely due to a lack of young people getting tested and asymptomatic cases not being counted in the official reported figures.
But that’s just not true, said John Edmunds, an epidemiologist and member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies committee that advises the British government on COVID-19 policy.
Edmunds told ABC News that several key circumstances appear to explain the sudden drop in cases.
End of Euro 2020 championships
A surge largely triggered by a return to normal, non-pandemic behavior during the Euro 2020 soccer championships has now mostly dissipated.
“The Euros was a glimpse of what would happen if we started to go back to much more normal behavior and went back to the pubs to watch football and so on,” Edmunds said. “Suddenly cases surge.”
But since the tournament is over, Brits aren’t going to the pubs and nightclubs as much, according to Edmunds’ behavioral surveys.
“People’s behavior at the moment is nowhere near normal behavior,” he said, even though there are no more restrictions in place.
The ‘pingdemic’
Shortly after the Euros, in mid-July, the British government’s contact tracing app also became embroiled in a situation that became known as the “pingdemic.”
Hundreds of thousands of people across the U.K. were suddenly ordered to self-isolate at home, after being notified by the app that they had come into contact with someone who had tested positive for the virus.
Businesses were faced with staffing shortages, and there were chaotic scenes at Heathrow Airport in London when suddenly hundreds of security staff were told to go home and isolate.
School vacations
Another key factor is the closure of schools during summer vacations. During the school year, schoolchildren and teachers are regularly tested, but they aren’t tested while on summer vacation. The break seems to account not just for a dip in daily tests but also in the virus spreading between children, parents and teachers, Edmunds said.
“School closure has been very important, and we’ve seen the effect of it throughout the pandemic, with schools opening and closing,” he said. “But it’s so important now because we’ve concentrated so much infection into the younger age groups because they are not vaccinated.”
The government has opened vaccination eligibility to young people within three months of turning 18. Health advisers say there is little benefit to vaccinating children because so few become seriously ill or die from the virus. There is currently no vaccine authorized for use in children younger than 12 years old, though some children deemed to be of particular risk to COVID-19 are allowed to be vaccinated under current rules.
It is the return of schools and businesses that worries Edmunds.
“My fear has always been September when schools open again, and I think at that point, businesses, companies, organizations will start to assess employees to come back in to the office,” he said. “I hope they don’t, but if they do I think we will see another surge in cases in the autumn.”
(NEW YORK) — One year after the blast that destroyed the port of Beirut and a large part of the city, the families of the dead are still looking for answers.
In the aftermath of the huge blast at a warehouse in the port of Beirut, where 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer which can also used as an explosive, had been left there for years, the authorities promised the results of an investigation within days. Instead, not only has the investigation barely advanced, the area around the port blast has barely been repaired, serving as a metaphor for the Lebanese capital’s recent woes.
At least 218 people were killed in what has been described as one of the largest non-nuclear blasts ever recorded, causing billions of dollars in damage. A report by Human Rights Watch published on Aug. 3 has pointed the finger at some government officials, saying some “foresaw the death that the ammonium nitrate’s presence in the port could result in and tacitly accepted the risk of the deaths occurring.”
The caretaker government issued a statement saying the report was “faulty” and “deviates from the truth.”
The country’s problems run far deeper than rebuilding the city, once nicknamed the “Paris of the Middle East.” According to the World Bank, Lebanon is in the midst of an economic crisis that ranks in the top 10, and possible the top three, experienced in any single country since the mid-1800s.
Last year Lebanon entered hyperinflation — and each week the Lebanese pound depreciates in value, leaving goods unaffordable for the once affluent middle class, which has now, according to experts, ceased to exist.
According to the World Bank data, overall poverty in Lebanon was estimated at 27% in 2011, before the Syrian Civil War. Now, however, more than half the population is living below the poverty line, according to UNICEF. Over the past two years alone, the level of extreme poverty has risen threefold, according to the U.N. — and the price of food and drink has risen by 670%. That has left 1.5 million people in need of humanitarian and financial aid.
“For over a year, Lebanese authorities countered an assailment of compounded crises — namely, the country’s largest peace-time economic and financial crisis, COVID-19 and the Port of Beirut explosion — with deliberately inadequate policy responses,” according to the World Bank’s latest report in April 2021. “The inadequacy is less due to knowledge gaps and quality advice and more the result of a combination of (i) a lack of political consensus over effective policy initiatives; and (ii) political consensus in defense of a bankrupt economic system.”
The World Bank describes the collapse as a “deliberate depression,” and on the streets of Beirut Lebanese cannot hide their disdain for the ruling classes.
“This explosion was a disaster for all people,” Raghda Tawfik El-Ashry, 57, a clothes seller, told ABC News. “I was here when it happened, and I saw what nobody had seen. All my goods were damaged because the fire and the ashes fell on them. Where was the state?”
“They are all a bunch of criminals and it’s all about nepotism,” she said. “I won’t remain silent.”
The government, according to Maya Yahya, director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, a think tank, has created “no policy” since the Beirut blast. In the aftermath of the 1975-1990 Civil War, a political settlement was reached that has allowed sectarian groups and political actors to all be represented in government, “which basically took away oversight,” Yahya said.
“The militia heads [were allowed] to simply move into government positions,” she said. “They treated the state and its institutions as a war booty. They turned to state institutions into extensions of their own fiefdoms.”
That legacy has plagued the country to this day, she said, while political assassinations, beginning with the killing of Rafic Hariri in 2005, have become a regular feature of political life, she said.
“The message is quite clear. If you raise your voice too much, the threat of physical violence is an instrument we’re always ready to use,” she said.
Most families rely on backup fuel generators, medicine is increasingly scarce and long queues at gas stations are now a fact of daily life in the country.
Elie Jabbour, 24, a recent graduate with a civil engineering degree, told ABC News that of his class of 100, only two had gone on to find meaningful work, and around half at left the country. Each day comes a period, he said, there are hours without electricity, which has become a daily routine.
“We are fully relying on these generators, which are very toxic for the environment,” he told ABC News. “And they are they cannot stand this 24-hour supply of electricity. And this is affecting us since we are living in a [pandemic-induced] lockdown, kind of a lockdown. So our life is highly dependent on the Internet. And in the time where there’s no electricity, there’s no Internet, and there’s in this time, we cannot do anything.”
“[The Lebanese people] have lost hope,” he added. “They are trying to fight with whatever is remaining, they are losing money by the day and there’s no middle class anymore.”
Many young, educated Lebanese are now fleeing the country in search of “dignity,” Rani, a 25-year-old resident of Beirut, told ABC News. He is planning to join abroad.
“The situation right now in Lebanon is beyond horrendous,” he said. “We have multiple crises. We have the crisis of the pandemic, an economic crisis, an ethical crisis, a cultural crisis. Education is going down. Finding food — basic necessities — being able to supply yourself with basic necessities is growing more and more difficult.”
The decline has been rapid, although according to independent Lebanese economist Roy Badaro, can be attributed to decades of mismanagement from the political class. Particularly consequential was the pegging of the value of the Lebanese pound to the U.S. dollar, Badaro said, which hid the country’s structural imbalances and fiscal deficit.
“The demand is very high because of the crazy prices of the necessities,” Soha Zaiter, Head of the Lebanese Food Bank, told ABC News. “A lot of people lost their jobs in the crisis so they don’t have any income; on the other hand, for people that still have their jobs, the value of the salary is very low in comparison to the prices. People are in need of everything, literally everything. From the smallest things to the most important items, like milk, diapers, oil, rice.”
According to independent Lebanese economist Roy Badaro, Lebanon requires new leadership — a single unitary government that can navigate the competing interests of various groups, in order to pave the way out of the crisis.
“You have the Shia/Sunni problem. You have the Ottoman/Arab problem. You have the East and West issue. You have the Europeans and the U.S. All these interactions. I think that Lebanon suffers from that,” he told ABC News. “We need to be rowing in the same direction. At the moment we are in a boat where each oar is rowing in a different direction.”
(WASHINGTON) — Even as the delta variant is causing higher COVID-19 case rates and hospitalizations across the United States, President Joe Biden will discuss his push to help get people around the world vaccinated in remarks Tuesday, highlighting that the U.S. has already shipped 110 million doses abroad.
The push to share vaccines globally is an effort to halt the rise of any future variants of the virus, which global health experts warn could potentially compromise vaccine immunity.
Biden will announce that the first of 500 million Pfizer vaccine doses the administration ordered for global distribution will begin shipping at the end of August. Of those doses, 200 million are expected to ship in 2021, with the remaining 300 million to follow in 2022.
Biden announced the 500 million-dose commitment at the G-7 summit in the United Kingdom in June, as part of an effort to drum up additional contributions from allies.
“We’re gonna help lead the world out of this pandemic, working alongside our global partners,” Biden said in remarks ahead of the summit. He added that the U.S. had a “responsibility” and a “humanitarian obligation to save as many lives as we can.”
Biden will also tout a vaccine-sharing milestone Tuesday: that the U.S. has already shipped more than 110 million doses to more than 60 countries around the world, mostly through COVAX, the World Health Organization’s vaccine-sharing initiative. The U.S. has shared more doses than every other country combined, according to U.N. data.
In April, Biden first committed to sharing 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which were purchased by the U.S. but never received FDA emergency use authorization. Biden also pledged in May to share another 20 million doses of the three available vaccines in the U.S., totaling a pledge of 80 million doses. Tuesday’s remarks will highlight the fact that U.S. contributions worldwide have already outpaced that 80 million-dose pledge.
Still, global public health experts warn that wealthier nations need to step up their efforts, noting that the longer it takes for poorer countries to become vaccinated, the longer the pandemic will persist worldwide.
Various non-governmental agencies, including the Center for Strategic International Studies, the Duke University Global Health Institute and the Center for Global Development penned an open letter to the Biden administration Tuesday, calling on the U.S. to ramp up its efforts.
“The US and G7 allies have taken important but modest steps to close the global vaccine gap, including by accelerating large-scale production and delivery of high-quality vaccines, increasing financial support to COVAX, and committing to share roughly 900 million doses over the next year (including 580 million from the US). But these actions fall far short of the true scale and urgency required,” the letter says.
“Getting 110 million doses out is really helpful, but in the scale that we need to find a way to get 10 billion plus doses out, it’s not even in the order of magnitude to make a difference,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. “The U.S. has done more than any other country so far, but that’s more an indictment of the whole response, as opposed to the U.S. standing out in any positive way.”
Udayakumar warned that while the focus continues to be on worldwide vaccine supply, distribution challenges will soon come to the fore.
“We have under-invested on the ground in ensuring vaccines can turn into vaccinations. My biggest concern is we’re going to see vaccines sitting in freezers around the world.” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration is expanding the group of Afghans who could be granted refugee status and flee to the United States to escape the growing threat of the Taliban across Afghanistan, the State Department announced Monday.
The militant group is increasingly gaining control of districts across the country, as the war-torn country teeters dangerously towards collapse into all-out civil war.
But while President Joe Biden has committed to helping Afghans who helped the U.S. military and diplomatic mission in the country for the last 20 years, the new policy will apply only to Afghans who have left the country and will take at least over a year for their cases to be processed, according to senior State Department officials — even as the risk to these Afghans is urgent.
The Biden administration has launched relocation flights for thousands of Afghans who worked as interpreters, guides, and other contractors and applied for Special Immigrant Visas – some 20,000 applicants in total, according to a State Department spokesperson, although only a fraction of them will be evacuated by the U.S.
For interpreters and other contractors who did not meet the required two years of service for a Special Immigrant Visa, the State Department will now allow them to apply for refugee status instead. They’re also expanding the pool of potential refugees to any Afghan who worked for a U.S.-based media outlet, for a U.S. government-funded program, or for a U.S. government-supported project.
After 20 years of humanitarian development across the country, that’s a wide category of Afghans, along with their eligible family members. Senior State Department officials declined to provide an estimate, but said it was likely in the tens of thousands in total.
The administration has been under pressure, especially from Republican and Democrat lawmakers and U.S. veterans’ groups, to do more to help Afghans who worked with or for the U.S. during two decades of war and development – and who therefore may be at greater risk of retaliatory attacks by the Taliban.
While the militant group’s political leaders have said Afghans will not be harmed, the last year has seen a string of high-profile assassinations against journalists, women’s rights activists, minority leaders, and military and police chiefs. At least 300 interpreters have been killed by Taliban fighters since 2014, according to the advocacy group No One Left Behind.
“The U.S. objective remains a peaceful, secure Afghanistan. However, in light of increased levels of Taliban violence, the U.S. government is working to provide certain Afghans, including those who worked with the United States, the opportunity for refugee resettlement to the United States,” the State Department said in a statement.
But the refugee resettlement process takes several months, if not years, including intensive security vetting, and the process will require Afghan applicants to leave the country, according to senior State Department officials – something that many cannot afford, cannot risk, or cannot manage.
“This program is meant to expand the aperture of people who have an opportunity to be resettled in the United States beyond the SIVs. It is our attempt to try to offer an option to people,” said a senior State Department official.
The State Department has said it will evacuate nearly 5,000 of those “SIV’s,” or Special Immigrant Visa applicants, along with their eligible family members like spouses and children.
Some 750 and their dependents – 2,500 in total – who have been granted approval by the U.S. embassy in Kabul and cleared security vetting will be moved to Fort Lee, a U.S. Army base in central Virginia. The first of them arrived last Friday, with a second flight with 200 more arriving early Monday and now at Ft. Lee, according to a U.S. official.
In addition, 4,000 applicants who have been approved by the embassy, but are awaiting security clearances, will be moved to safe third countries. Along with their family members, the group could total approximately 20,000, and diplomatic discussions on where to house them all as they wait months for their applications to be processed remain underway with several countries, including Kuwait, Qatar, and Kazakhstan, according to U.S. officials.
But a senior State Department official said the administration does not plan to relocate any of the Afghans who now qualify for refugee status under this new designation, known as Priority 2, or P2. Instead, their employer will open a case with the embassy in Kabul, and once the U.S. government confirms it is ready to begin processing their case, they must find their own way to a third country and declare themselves a refugee.
“At this point in time, unfortunately, we do not anticipate relocating them, but we will continue to examine all the options to protect those who have served with or for us, and we will review the situation on the ground, and our planning will continue to evolve,” said the senior official.
Once outside of Afghanistan, it could take at least 12 to 14 months for their case to be adjudicated, per the senior official.
As the new designations could lead to thousands of Afghans fleeing the country and seeking refugee status, a second senior official said the U.S. government has had conversations with some of Afghanistan’s neighbors, like Pakistan, about preparing for refugee flows and keeping their borders open to refugees.
ABC News’s Luis Martinez contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Israel is now the first in the world to give a third booster COVID-19 vaccine shot to those over 60 and other vulnerable people as cases rise.
The U.K. expected to roll out boosters next month.
Watch the full report from ABC’s Good Morning America:
(CASABLANCA, Morocco) — “I feel very happy to carry my child,” 26 year-old Halima Cissé told ABC News, while holding newborn Muhammad, one of the nine babies to beat the world record for most babies born at one birth.
Cissé, already a mother to a little girl, gave birth to nine children on May 5. “All the children are doing well,” said Dr. El Alaoui, head of the clinic.
The four boys, named Muhammad, Bah, El Hadj and Oumar and five girls — Adama, Hawa, Fatouma, Oumou and Kadidia, are being taken care of at the clinic Ain Borja in Casablanca, Morocco.
Cissé, a 26 year-old student and Abdelkader Arby, a 35 year-old adjudant in the Malian army, say they have always wanted children. ” Everybody wants children … but if they had told me that I, Abdelkader Arby, would one day be the father of nine, I would not have believed it,” he told ABC News.
The parents say the extraordinary birth is a “gift from God,” and said the “responsibility is heavy,”
After a consultation with an OB-GYN revealed that Cissé, was carrying seven fetuses, authorities organized her transfer from Bamako, Mali, to the clinic Ain Borja in Morocco where she would received specialized care.
The clinic prepared for the unusual birth of seven , before discovering during the operation two others.
“A lot of things were going through my mind, fear for myself, fear for my kids, how it was going to unfold,” Cissé told ABC News.
El Alaoui, head of the clinic Ain Borja, told ABC News that they tried to postpone the birth as long as they could to keep the babies’ chances high.
Cissé, who nearly lost her life due to blood loss and had to be operated on after the delivery, spent a month at the clinic on her back before the birth. She describes the difficult nights when she couldn’t sleep on the side until the day of birth, at 30 weeks pregnant.
“We thought, if we manage to save four, five children it’s already not bad,” said El Alaoui.
The birth of nine children is an extremely rare phenomenon. Only two others were recorded so far, in Australia in 1971 and in Malaysia in 1999. But Cissé’s is the the first example of nonuplets born alive.
Soumia Arkoubi, head nurse at the clinic, said “they take care of [the nonuplets] like it’s our own children” and that “it will be hard to see them go.”
With diapers changed every three hours at the clinic, the nine bundles of joy go through nearly 75 diapers a day and 100 bottles of milk.
American Nadya Suleman, nicknamed “Octomom,” holds the current Guiness world record after giving birth to eight children following an IVF treatment.
However, according to the parents and the medical staff at Ain Borja, Cissé’s children were conceived naturally.
The children were all born prematurely, the smallest weighing only one pound at birth.
They will have to stay in the neonatal care at the clinic for at least another month before they can hope to meet their big sister in Mali.
(ST. PETERSBURG, Russia) — At the start of June, St. Petersburg’s local administration stopped publishing information about how many COVID-19 patients had been hospitalized in the Russian city.
The sudden disappearance of the previously daily reported figures happened to coincide with the opening of one the city‘s most prestigious annual events, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
The forum, a gathering of Russia’s elite and a showcase for its biggest companies, has become a flagship event under President Vladimir Putin. Over five days, 13,000 people were expected to attend the event, where Putin told the audience that life was “gradually returning to its normal routine” after the pandemic.
But the forum was opening just as St. Petersburg was seeing a terrifying surge in COVID-19 cases, as a third wave fueled in part by the delta variant bore down on the country. The last bulletin before the numbers vanished had shown St. Petersburg hospitalizing 500 people a day — a record number and one that meant the city would run out of hospital beds within days.
Journalists and critics of the government quickly started asking if the disappearance of the COVID-19 statistics was connected to holding the forum. St. Petersburg’s administration refused to comment and the latest figures weren’t published again until nearly three weeks later. They were no longer updated daily, either.
“They need to create the impression that everything is OK,” said Boris Vishnevsky, an opposition lawmaker from St. Petersburg’s city assembly, who also opposed holding the forum. “They don’t care about people’s lives and health.”
Throughout the pandemic, Russian authorities have been accused of massaging statistics to hide the real scale of the country’s COVID-19 impact. The Kremlin has repeatedly suggested that although it has been difficult, Russia has fared better than most other countries, even as it has neglected to impose tough lockdown measures.
But publicly available mortality statistics, as well as other data, show an ever growing, yawning gap between Russia’s official COVID-19 figures and what are likely the far larger real numbers. The data suggest the true death toll may already be over a half-million people. Far from doing better than most, the data suggests that, in reality, Russia has suffered one of the deadliest COVID-19 epidemics in the world.
The toll is growing even steeper now as Russia endures a deadly third wave that has remained largely unchecked amid few restrictions and poor vaccination uptake — the latter caused in part by some of the highest levels of vaccine scepticism in the world.
Russia’s official COVID-19 death toll, published by the government’s coronavirus task force, currently stands at around 155,000. In total numbers, that still places Russia fourth in the world, behind only Brazil, India and the United States. But, given the size of the country’s 144 million population and the number of cases it has had, that number appears puzzlingly low.
There is a consensus among experts internationally that the best method to assess the true toll of the pandemic in Russia is by counting so-called “excess deaths.” That is, comparing the total number of deaths from any cause in a country during the pandemic periods with the total number of deaths in an average year.
Almost every country hit by the pandemic has seen a steep increase in total deaths compared to the average. Although some of those extra deaths can be attributed to other causes, such as disruption to health systems, most experts believe the vast majority are COVID-19 deaths.
Russia’s official death toll doesn’t take into account excess deaths, but its national statistics service, Rosstat, has quietly continued to release total mortality data for each month, publishing it in spreadsheets on its website. That has allowed independent demographers and journalists to calculate excess deaths for Russia during the pandemic.
The mortality data so far released by Rosstat shows that in 2020, Russia suffered 340,000 more deaths than in 2019. For the first five months of 2021, there were 133,000 more excess deaths.
That means Russia has sustained at least 473,000 more deaths during the pandemic than usual, already three times higher than its officially reported toll. That does not yet include June and July, the deadliest months of the current third wave.
“I think that by the end of September, the overall excess mortality will be at least 700,000 people,” said Alexey Raksha, an independent demographer who previously worked at Rosstat. “It is a huge number.”
By proportion of the population, the current figures give Russia the highest death toll of any major country in the world and place it in the top five of any country in the world, behind only Peru, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Serbia, according to a ranking by The Economist tracking excess deaths globally.
“In November and December of last year, the number of deaths have been record. The biggest in history, in post-war history in Russia,” said Raksha.
Raksha was fired from his job as a demographer at Rosstat last year after he publicly pointed out the discrepancies in the official COVID-19 statistics. He has accused Russian authorities of crudely manipulating the numbers, which he says is visible in the unnatural anomalies in the data released by the country’s coronavirus task force.
He points to line graphs showing monthly deaths for Moscow, where steep curves indicating increasing deaths at certain times suddenly flatline and hold steady for several days.
“It’s in contradiction with all statistical, epidemiological, demographical law,” Raksha said. “It’s just impossible.”
He said the sudden plateaus are nicknamed the “Soybanin’s Shelf,” referring to Moscow’s Mayor Sergey Sobyanin. He said they were the result of city officials simply putting a limit on the number of deaths that could be published that day.
“At some point, Sobyanin just ordered not to show more than 75 deaths daily in Moscow. That’s it,” Raksha said.
Russian health officials have previously said they take a more conservative approach to assessing COVID-19 deaths. But that does not explain the vast difference and, at times, officials have acknowledged the real death toll is substantially higher.
In December, Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova, who oversees the COVID-19 response, acknowledged that around 81% of all excess deaths in Russia were caused by COVID-19. The federal statistics service in June also published an estimate suggesting there had been over 270,000 COVID-19 deaths.
But Russia’s primary official death toll, which is most often used internationally and in state media, has not been updated to match those statements.
A recent investigation by three independent Russian investigative news sites also found evidence that internal government records show it is also concealing the scale of COVID-19 cases in the country by as much as five times.
The sites, Meduza, Kholod and Mediazona, reported that an oversight by Russia’s health ministry in issuing certificates confirming recent COVID-19 patients had inadvertently revealed the ministry has a database containing 29 million recorded COVID-19 cases. The official public count currently only shows six million.
The government has denied the reports, but issued conflicting responses, saying the database was not accurate and that it also contained vaccination numbers.
Critics have said the efforts to make Russia’s bout with the pandemic appear less deadly are making it worse by discouraging people from taking the virus seriously, which they say also hampers its push to vaccinate. Although Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine has been found to be effective, authorities are struggling to persuade Russians to get it.
With few restrictions in place and still less than 20% of the population fully vaccinated, doctors in the city told ABC News they feared a fourth wave in the autumn was already inevitable.
“Doctors will answer for it, not the government,” said a paramedic in St. Petersburg, who requested anonymity over concerns she could face retaliation.
In St. Petersburg last week, Alexander Yablokov, a 68-year-old soccer manager, said he did not believe the official death toll after he spent three weeks in a COVID-19 hospital. While there, he said he was in a small ward where all but one of seven patients with him died within a week. He said he had pulled his blanket over his head whenever he heard the sound of a gurney coming down the corridor, knowing another of his neighbors had passed.
“I thought I had found myself in a morgue. Not a hospital but a morgue,” he said
