29 million

In the closed Covid -ire-Russian Ministry of Health, there were five times more records than officially ill in Russia

Studying the certificates issued by “public services”, “cold”, “mediazon” and “Medusa” found that in the register of the Ministry of Health, created to track the number of coronavirus, more than 29 million records are five times more than the operational headquarters officially reports. At the peak of the second wave in winter, 125 thousand people per day were introduced into the register - the incidence was higher in the world only in the USA and India. If these figures are correct, Russia is in the first place in the world in terms of the number of infected Covid-19 in terms of a million inhabitants.

Medusa and Mediazon, with which we did this study, are included in the register of "foreign media that perform the functions of a foreign agent." Therefore, in accordance with the order of Roskomnadzor, we are obliged to precede the publication with the following notification: “This message (material) has been created and (or) widespread by a foreign media that performs the functions of a foreign agent, and (or) a Russian legal entity that performs the functions of a foreign agent.” The font size of this notification is also regulated by order of Roskomnadzor.

In early July, physicist Sergei Spilkin had a “one idea”.

Spilkin, known for his studies of statistical anomalies in the elections, suggested that on “public services” certificates of vaccination are most likely numbered in order. This would mean that any Russian, having looked at the last eight digits of his certificate, can find out how many people have been vaccinated throughout the country before him.

To check the hypothesis, Spilkin asked the subscribers to send him part of the certificate number. Soon he realized that such a numbering is really united for the whole of Russia, regardless of the region. The received numbers coincided with the data on the vaccination pace that Gogov.ru independent portal collected - the Ministry of Health himself did not begin to publish operational data on his own.

Then Spilkin's “another idea arose” . He suggested that the certificates for the ill covid-19 , which began to issue this summer, can be arranged in the same way. And again he asked the readers for help: to send an impersonal part of the certificate number and the date of recovery from coronavirus indicated in it.

The data collected by him show that the number of ill -known to the state can be several times higher than the numbers reported by the operative.

What certificates are we talking about? “State Services” give out two types of certificates: about vaccination from coronavirus and that a person has been ill with them in the last six months. The first type has existed for a long time; The second is from July 1, 2021.

Certificates for the venal introduced against the background of new restrictions during the third wave: first in Moscow, and then in several other regions, it was possible to get to restaurants and cafes only by showing at the entrance of the QR code, confirming that the visitor was vaccinated, recently ill or surrendered to the PCR test.

QR codes on public services and on the website of the Moscow City Hall are different. In Moscow certificates, instead of the serial number, a random set of letters and numbers is displayed.

In Moscow, these rules were canceled after three weeks, but before that, on June 24, the deputy minister of digital development Oleg Kachanov, talking about the difficulties with issuing certificates for the over -utility, mentioned their number - it turned out to be twice as high as the official one: “The unified register of the agitated Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation is made ... We will have this integration, and we have for those who were ill and there in the register nearby near There are nine million records, we [QR codes] will receive. ”

On June 24, the opera station reported only 4.9 million COVID-19 cases revealed throughout the country. It is unclear about which people who have been ill and for how long Kachanov spoke. Perhaps it was about people who infected coronavirus over the past six months - then the rating of 9 million coincides with the certificates of the mediazones based on the numbers of certificates.

Unique number

The reader of the Mediazone (asked not to indicate her name) from Moscow infected with coronavirus at the end of March, she was ill easily and had already received a negative PCR test within two weeks. Three months later, the “State Service” application sent her a notification about receiving an “certificate of immunization after Covid-19 illness”. Judging by the last eight digits in this certificate, before March 2021, more than 22 million people were introduced to the register of coronavirus.

The QR code, for which such certificates began to issue-this is an ordinary hyperlink, which leads to a special section of the Supreme Court of Site. The restaurant employee scans the code, crosses the link and sees that the person has been ill or vaccinated, which means that he can be put into the room.

If you open a link on the computer and see the page HTML code, you can notice that the certificate number is indicated by the UNRZ abbreviation.

UNRZ is deciphered as a "unique register record number." Such a term is used in many registers of the Ministry of Health - for example, on a certificate page after vaccination. For those who vaccinate, the certificate number is extremely simple: first there is a number 9, then the two -digit code of the region and the serial number of the vaccinated - only 16 digits (the number begins with five zero; during the study we did not meet a number where other numbers would have appeared instead of these zeros). The rules for loading these data from the register vaccinated to the "State Services" were developed in August 2020.

In the certificate for the ill ones, there are also 16 digits, but it is arranged differently. The first group of digits consists of an eight, the region’s code and a unit - this figure in all the certificates we have verified is the same and, judging by the same registers , denotes the recipient of budget funds. The next four digits are a month and a year of diagnosis. Another eight digits are the serial number of the record in the register.

Exactly the same format, only without eight at the beginning, is used in the federal register of persons patients with the new coronavirus infection Covid-19, created by the Ministry of Health in March 2020 to track the number of cases. Data from it never appeared in the public domain.

Apparently, in order to create a certificate of recovered at the "public services", the mincifers simply took his number from this register of the Ministry of Health and added an eight to him in front.

Why do we think so?

This is also evidenced by the version of the certificate in a specialized JSON format, which can also be downloaded from “public services”: there is a UNRZ field of 15 digits and separately Unrzfull - with eight in front, similar to the certificate number.

Mediazone asked the Mincifers to confirm that the number of the ill -fed certificate is formed on the basis of the UNRZ from the coronavirus register of the Ministry of Health. The Mincifers replied that “the portal of public services is a window data” from the register. “When forming a certificate, the register recording of the Ministry of Health is used,” the department admitted.

At the end of June, a description of the data loading scheme “From the Covid” regimen appeared in the Situations Center of the Ministry of Council and on the technical portal of public services. So it is indicated that for each patient, information was supposed to be provided about the diagnosis, medical institution, the recovery date and the 15-digit URZ.

In the training video of the Ministry of Health it is shown that a person is assigned to the UNRZ, when the data on him for the first time remain in the register - that is, at the moment when he detected the disease. The technical description of a similar register (people with rare diseases) also says that the UNRZ contains the date of entering: this explains why the mediazone reader, who recovered in April, received a certificate with the second group of numbers 0321 - that is, related to March, when she was diagnosed and obviously made to the register.

So, the last eight digits in the certificate are the serial number of not a recovered, but sick.

The interlocutor of Medusa in one of the regional Ministry of Health confirmed that the serial number in the register is a single country and reflects the total number of registered sick at the time of the creation of a particular UNRZ.

125 thousand new cases per day at the peak of the epidemic

Several dozen certificates and recovery dates that Sergey Spilkin collected have allowed to evaluate the scale of the epidemic over the past six months-the numbers assigned earlier on the “public services” are not available, since the QR code is valid only after recovery.

The freshest of the received certificate number belongs to a person who was ill with coronavirus in June 2021. Its serial number is 27 million 300 thousand. To the question of whether this figure corresponds to reality, familiar with the work of the register, the source of Medusa in one of the federal departments replied: “It is.”

Studying the numbers of certificates, we found out that by mid -July, the numbers of certificates published at the “public services” have already exceeded the mark of 29 million.

At the same time, the opera officially reports only 6 million cases from the beginning of the epidemic in Russia - this is almost five times less than the number of records in the register of the Ministry of Health. 29 million infected ones would bring Russia to third place in the world in an absolute number of cases of coronavirus. In terms of a million inhabitants, the country would have risen from 85 places to the first, ahead of all the rest of the country's most affected from the coronavirus.

By comparing the number of certificates with the dates of recovery, Spilkin built a curve (basic splan - a set of smoothed lines calculated mathematically on segments 28 days long), which approximately describes the dynamics of the appearance of new numbers - that is, the dynamics of incidence.

If you evaluate the number of new records for the day by this curve (take the derivative), it turns out that in winter at the peak of the second wave of the epidemic, the number of cases identified in Russia reached 125 thousand per day. More only in India and the USA.

The certificate is created only after a person’s recovery, but the number in it belongs to the date of detection of the disease. This means that the number of patients indicated in the room is “behind” for at least two to three weeks-this time usually takes an official recovery. Therefore, it is impossible to say exactly what dates the peak of the appearance of new entries in the register came.

Officially, the maximum of fixed cases - almost 30 thousand sick per day - happened on December 24.

"The register is filled very honestly, but it is inaccurate"

According to the instructions of the Ministry of Health, not only people with a positive result of a “laboratory study” (that is, PCR and other tests) should fall into the register, but also those who were diagnosed with Covid-19 “using other diagnostic methods” (according to the recommendations of the department, we are talking about computed tomography). In addition, “all cases of pneumonia, including outpatients” fall into the register. The number of records in the register reflects cases of the disease, but not equal to the number of sick people. If a person is infected again a second time, under his new case they create a new record.

In fact, a source in one of the federal departments explained to Medusa, the regions can independently decide how to lead the register: to record strictly coronavirus and pneumonia or also dubious cases of SARS. These cases of SARS can be up to 20-30%there.

“The register is filled very honestly, but it is inaccurate,” the interlocutor says, noting that at the federal level it is necessary to double -check the data provided by the regions.

Patients whose diagnosis has not been confirmed is removed from the register, the source notes - and the serial number is released and then assigned to the new sick. Because of this, the number of records in the register does not show the situation in real time, since at least a day is required to clarify and reject “extra” cases.

Similar jumps in the numbering are also visible among the certificates received by Sergei Shpilkin. For example, a certificate with a serial number that begins at 2327 was issued in April 2021. At the same time, the number starting at 2376 is recorded in March. It turns out that the April number, although it was awarded later, took the place that had previously been released in order among the March.

Shpilkin does not begin to evaluate the contribution of rejected numbers to the general statistics: “To see such things, you need to have an exact date for entering the register, and we only have a month of entry (presumably) and the discharge date. The first of these dates has accuracy per month, and the second is subject to the natural scatter of the scale of weeks, so such subtle effects are not visible. ”

What share of 29 million notes in the register is occupied by patients with pneumonia, which is not related to coronavirus, is unknown. For the statistics of the incidence of inflammation of the lungs excluding the Covid-19 “Mediazona”, she turned to Rosstat, who already provided such data for the first months of 2020. Now the department replied that “at present, the Ministry of Health of Russia and Rospotrebnadzor is entering the Rosstat only about the incidence of the population according to the main classes of diseases, individual infectious and socially significant diseases,” among which there is no separate column dedicated to pneumonia.
In March 2021, the freelance epidemiologist of the Ministry of Health Nikolai Briko said that over the past decade to coronavirus in Russia, about 580 thousand cases of pneumonia have been recorded every year; In 2020, 2.7 million cases were recorded - that is, five times more.

In 2020, the mortality from pneumonia in Russia increased by 140% - mainly due to regions with high excess mortality and low official statistics of coronavirus deaths. Therefore, it is logical to assume that the surge of pneumonia last year is still associated with the Covid-19.

The Ministry of Health and the opera not confirm

Mediazona and Medusa turned to the Ministry of Health and the Federal Operational Headquarters to combat coronavirus with a request to comment on the number of records in the register and its difference from official reports. The headquarters asked to bring their comment entirely:

Comment by the Federal Operational Staff to Coronavirus Federal Information Resource for Accounting for Information in order to prevent the spread of a new coronavirus infection Covid-19, created for official use, contains information about the following citizens:

-with a confirmed diagnosis of Covid-19,

- hospitalized with signs of pneumonia,

Your information about 27 million cases of COVID-19 or pneumonia is not true. The figure of 27 million, which is referred by your source, really appears in the information resource, but with respect to the vaccine vaccinated by the first component of the vaccine as of July 9, 2021.

Actual information on the number of cases of COVID-19, including without clinical manifestations, is reported daily to the operational headquarters to prevent the fees and distribution of a new coronavirus infection in Russia and is published in open access on the STOPKOronavirus.rf website. On July 15, 2021, 5,882,295 cases of COVID-19 in Russia were registered.

The Ministry of Health on the clarifying question about the register of the ecclaced stated that the commentary of the opera station reflects their position too. According to the representative of the department, “the only thing that this figure [27 million] is similar” is data about the first component, as of July 9. He urged to focus only on the daily reports of the operational headquarters about the number of sick people.

Thus, the operative suggested that, speaking of 27 million records, the editors mixed the registers of the ill and vaccinated. This is wrong. The numbers of certificates are shown by numbers that are not comparable to vaccination in Russia.

For example, in the above screenshot of the certificate of the ill -fed, the recovery date is on February 18. The serial number in this certificate is 17 million. But by mid -February, only 11 million doses of vaccines were produced in Russia, and only about four million people were vaccinated .

After the publication of the text with the Mediazona, the reader contacted that in July 2021, due to the error on the public services website, he received a certificate of the ill Covid-19-although he transferred Koronavirus back in April 2020 and recovered in May.

As evidence of his words, the reader showed the editors of the screenshot of the certificate and sent the correspondent a letter from the public services, which indicates the date of recovery (now this certificate in the personal account is not available).

Certificate screenshot

The number of this certificate begins with 214,000 - that is, corresponds to the serial number of 214 thousand records in the UNRZ. According to the operating system, by the end of April 2020, 106 thousand cases of Covid-19 were identified in Russia.

It also proves that we did not confuse the registers of the sick and vaccinated: in April 2020 there were no vaccinations from coronavirus yet - the first Russian Vaccine Sputnik V was registered in August.