COVID-19 pandemic in Russia

The COVID-19 pandemic in Russia was a part of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

The virus was confirmed to have spread to Russia on 31 January 2020, when two Chinese citizens in Tyumen (Siberia) and Chita (Russian Far East) tested positive for the virus. Early prevention measures included restricting the China–Russia border and extensive testing. The infection spread from Italy on 2 March, leading to additional measures such as cancelling events, closing schools, theatres, and museums, as well as shutting the border and declaring a non-working period which, after two extensions, lasted until 11 May 2020. By the end of March 2020, COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed by the majority of federal subjects of Russia, including Moscow. By the end of 2021, there were nearly 10.5 million cases and nearly 310,000 deaths in the country.

Russia had the tenth-highest number of confirmed cases in the world, after the United States, India, France, Brazil, Germany, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan. According to detailed data published by the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), 114,268 people with COVID-19 died between April and November 2020. However, over 300,000 excess deaths were reported in the same time period, suggesting that the official pandemic death tally greatly underestimated the true number of COVID-19 related deaths.

Analysis of excess deaths from official government statistics, based on births and deaths and excluding migration, showed that Russia had its largest ever annual population drop in peacetime, with the population declining by 997,000 between October 2020 and September 2021, which demographer Alexei Raksha interpreted as being primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic.