To date, Russia has recorded only a SINGLE death from coronavirus.

Same reason they never had AIDS, drugs, prostitution, or poverty.

Unless they shut their borders down in December, before this officially was ruled a pandemic, there's no way that's true. Also, the China-Russia border is something like 4000 km long right? Let's think about this for a sec...

PhDoping wrote:

Unless they shut their borders down in December, before this officially was ruled a pandemic, there's no way that's true. Also, the China-Russia border is something like 4000 km long right? Let's think about this for a sec...

Yes it's a long border but there is not too much happening along there.

Keep in mind that "Russia in the east is not much more than some settlements and cities along the Transsib train route, which was build to protect the border.

I am sure they will get the virus eventually and maybe they have it already.

That's not true:

https://fullfact.org/online/Russia-unleashed-500-lions/

Russian people are just strong and hardy by nature. Their ancestors probably went through a lot of stuff that they now have inherited immunity to.

The environment of Russia-Siberia that territory is one where it was truly survival of the fittest. The Russians you see today are descendants from extremely tough folks.

wutwutoo wrote:

That's not true:

https://fullfact.org/online/Russia-unleashed-500-lions/

Duh.

Bartholemew and Jamin were separated at birth. As you can see they have an affinity for communist autocrats and an aversion to lifting weights.

It's already in many rural areas, but the country is large and people are spread out. Remember that Alaska was also part of Russia. Huge parts of the country is like that. I don't know if they have it in the largest cities yet, but I believe so based on how many people are staying home and the governments cuiet measures

The Dirty Duck wrote:

wutwutoo wrote:

That's not true:

https://fullfact.org/online/Russia-unleashed-500-lions/

Duh.

What is true is that Russia has tigers though.

While the official cases are low, 840 now with three deaths, the growth in the last ten days has been exponential; the last two days nearly doubled the number of cases and they have gone up by a factor of 4 in the last week. If the spread is that fast there is likely a lot of 'community' transmission, so that the unrecognized cases could be much larger. However, just three deaths is consistent with a bit more than the number of cases reported a couple of weeks ago.

Note that since the average time from getting the virus to expiring is about 17 days, and if only 1% are dying, then 17 days ago there were about 300 cases, much more than the listed of about 20 on March 10th. This implies that they have about the typical ratio of identified cases to true cases of about 9%. Of course, 3 is such a small number that such calculations have a lot more uncertainty about them.

We know enough about pandemics to have had 200 N95 masks; we have just turned 80% over to others, mainly the local hospital. There were from preparations for the Flu spread about 13 years ago, which got nipped in the bud earlier but I think might have had a lower R. R is the spreading factor from one person to others; an R below 1 means that the virus will diminish and the Chinese in Wuhan cut their R from about 3.5 to 0.35 by extreme measures that immediately had effect but the lag in catching cases made it appear that it took a couple weeks to take effect rather than about two days.

jesseriley wrote:

Same reason they never had AIDS, drugs, prostitution, or poverty.

Joe Stalin put an end to it.

jesseriley wrote:

When I went to russia in ‘89, I didn’t see a single computer. They didn’t even have a term in russian for “personal computers.”

I had my first personal (or rather, my family had) computer in 1985. It was fully made-in-Russia PDP-11 clone. Might be not so typical in 1985, but by 89 a lot of my friends at school had one at home (8bit Spectrum clones, typically). In Russian they were called just that, "personal computers", PCs.

Of course, we are talking about Moscow and big cities, in rural areas you could not find one. But wasn't it the same for US?

Engineers, perhaps? We had a computer lab at my public high school in 1978. Most of our early computers were used as “word processors” for writing & storing of word files; these made them more generally useful.

My mom was a writer & had one for her work by 1981, so did many media people. By contrast, I stayed with a relatively well off sports journalist in Moscow in ‘89. He used a typewriter more like a 1950’s machine in America.

It’s no secret that lack of a high-tech sector, lack of broad-based computer usage, has been a big negative for Russia. Especially in that many parents bought them for their children in USA, who learned to use them at an early age. By contrast, computers and a million other things were never offered for sale in the Soviet Union. Even musical instruments were bought illegally from USA.

Additionally, Russia made many items for export only, such as automobiles. Moscow itself had huge boulevards with hardly any automobiles on them.

Russia reports things differently:

COVID-19 Death = influenza

Radiation Sickness from Ingested Polonium = food poisoning

Found dead with three bullets in the back of the cranium and stuffed into the trunk of an old Lada = suicide

That is only partially true. In 1985, the PC we bought was selling openly in specialized electronic shops in big cities and anyone could buy one. The problem was the cost - 650 rubles. Typical white collar salary was 120-200 rubles. As a side note, entry level car was 10.000 rubles and you had to be on the waiting list or have some "connections" to buy one. But (and it's a big BUT) - everything changed around 89-93. All the kids of my generation (I was 13 in 1990) in cities have grown around PCs, internet, etc. Importing PCs or assembling them from cheap Asian components was probably the most lucrative legal business during those years. Booming. Everyone wanted to be either a businessman or a programmer. You can find them all over silicon valley now.

Portland Hobby Jogger wrote:

Russia reports things differently:

COVID-19 Death = influenza

Radiation Sickness from Ingested Polonium = food poisoning

Found dead with three bullets in the back of the cranium and stuffed into the trunk of an old Lada = suicide

lol

Agree, every computer genius left. Big-time brain drain. Not much opportunity in the Motherland. So still a huge deficit in Russia.