QUESTION: Many people suspect #Russia is cooking the books on the number of #COVID19 deaths there. How are they doing it? Rob Parsons @RobParsonsF24, Chief Foreign Editor at @FRANCE24 summed it brilliantly today. Follow this thread for the answer. 
ANSWER: “It’s the worst in terms of daily increases of infection in Europe. Over 10k people infected every day for the last 6 days. And at this rate, Russia will very quickly overtake the United Kingdom and Italy as well.
One of the things that’s interesting though about the figures that are coming out of Russia, is that although almost 200k people have now been infected in Russia, the death rate is significantly lower than you would expect.
Just under 2k - that's less than the daily death rate in the United States. So that's raising a lot of questions about what is going. How are these statistics being gathered in Russia? Do they reflect the reality or not?
There are many people inside Russia itself who are very skeptical about the way these figures are being counted. It’s interesting for instance in parts of the country there big spikes in cases of pneumonia
-makes one wonder whether coronavirus cases are big being put down as pneumonia.
There’s also doubt about the way that the statistics of being gathered. For instance, if you die and are known to have coronavirus –having tested for it, but have underlying conditions like a heart condition, like a liver problems and so forth,
that is not counted as a coronavirus death, but as a liver or heart failure and so on. So it does rather look as though the Russians, for one reason or another, are understating the death rate.”
More about Rob Parsons here: france24.com/en/robert-pars…
If you have a question about national security, follow @NatSecAnswers, send us your question and we'll get the answer. #A12 @threadreaderapp unroll @gregkoblentz @BethCameron_DC @USEmbRu @mbk_center @Billbrowder
