Perhaps Covid19 will help reduce some of the Social Security actuarial issues unaddressed by Congress failing to raise retirement age.

Tatiana Golikova, the head of Russia's coronavirus crisis centre, told President Vladimir Putin in late July that Russia's coronavirus mortality rate was "significantly lower than in a range of other countries".

But data released by the Rosstat State Statistics Service on Sept. 4 show there were 57,800 excess deaths between May and July, the peak of the outbreak.

The figure was calculated by comparing fatalities over those three months in 2020 with the average number of May-July deaths between 2015 and 2019. The excess total is more than three times greater than the official May-July COVID-19 death toll of 15,955.

Alexei Raksha, a demographer who worked for Rosstat until this summer, said the jump in Russian deaths illustrated the real toll from COVID-19, and that authorities had reported only some of the deaths publicly.

"In fact, the fatality rate in Russia differs only a little from other countries," said Raksha.