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[I never heard them complain about China.]

You must have missed all the articles about crematoria running 24 hours and doctors getting arrested. What’s interesting is that they haven’t bothered to do any the legwork with respect to Russia. My guess is that the deaths coming in from Spain and Italy are much headline-grabbing.

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:

[But the Russian medical news site PCR News this week said it had acquired a copy of the test’s make-up.

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. ]

For another, large numbers of pneumonia patients are not being coded as pneumonia patients or even tested. That’s a page out of Xi Jinping’s playbook:

[ “I am categorically sure, there are more coronavirus patients than the authorities are stating,” said Anastasia Vasilyeva, who leads Alliance of Doctors, a group that campaigns for health care improvements, and an ally of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

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.” ]

If Putin keeps this up, Russia’s daily covid-19 body count is going to dwarf Italy’s, and soon. And unlike Xi Jinping, he doesn’t have the repressive powers necessary to keep information from getting out, once foreign news bureaus decide to focus serious resources on the Russia beat of the covid-19 story.

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.

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.