IT'S NOT THE NATION; IT'S THE NATIONALISM:

[T]here are many ways in which Russia's response to the coronavirus crisis mirrors our own nation's response. And understanding both countries' public health crises reveals some harsh truths about how similar the two nations are -- both culturally and in terms of governance.  [...]

Before March was over, however, Russian coronavirus cases exploded: confirmed cases in the country rose exponentially, jumping from 495 on March 24 to 10,131 as of April 7. As of Friday morning on May 15, there are more than 262,000 confirmed cases in Russia -- the country lags only the United States in terms of total number of infected -- and at least 2,400 fatalities. A disproportionate amount of patients are in Moscow.

Still, not everyone thinks Russia's pandemic accounting is reliable.

"I think those statistics were just absolutely untrue," Bill Browder, a British financier and political activist who became one of Putin's most prominent enemies after he blew the whistle on alleged corruption in that country, told Salon earlier this week. "You basically can't trust anything that the Russian government says. And they're always looking for an angle. It wasn't clear what they were trying to achieve by saying it wasn't hitting them. Now they seem to be presenting an accurate number of cases, but they're still wildly undercounting the number of deaths."

Curiously, this mirrors much of the coronavirus reporting in the United States. As Bob Hennelly reported in Salon, first responders in New York reported seeing a tenfold increase in cardiac arrest deaths amid the pandemic -- almost certainly caused by the coronavirus, but not reported as such in official statistics. Likewise, the state of Virginia has been miscounting cases, with the Virginia Department of Health facing criticism for aggregating diagnostic and antibody tests into the same data pool, thereby providing unreliable information about the coronavirus pandemic in the state.

Jonathan Katz, a senior fellow at The German Marshall Fund who directs the Frontlines of Democracy Initiative, told Salon that Putin's response to the crisis has been sub-par, to say the least.

"What we're seeing is that Putin is a tactician," Katz told Salon. "He is not a manager of good governance. And his approach to the coronavirus has been first to deny that it was there, and that it was as widespread, and that continues today."

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