Moscow (CNN)Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan provided President Vladimir Putin with his first real test as a national leader in 1999, when militants in Chechnya crossed the border and launched a war that forged his image as a man of action.
More than two decades later, the remote mountainous region presents the Russian President with a new challenge, as its Covid-19 outbreak raises fresh questions about how Russia counts coronavirus infections and deaths.
As of Tuesday, Dagestan has 3,553 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 32 deaths, ranking it fifth out of 85 regions in official Russian federal statistics. But in an Instagram Live interview Sunday with a local journalist, the head of the republic’s ministry of health gave figures far higher than Moscow’s, saying the total number of people infected with coronavirus and community-acquired pneumonia in Dagestan exceeded 13,000, with 657 dead.
Asked by journalist Ruslan Kurbanov to explain why Covid-19 and pneumonia cases were being counted separately, the health official, Dzhamaludin Gadzhiibragimov, responded that pneumonia patients are treated as if they have the virus, but not all cases are ascribed to coronavirus due to a lack of testing.
“Basically, the same [treatment] methodology is used for both,” he said. “But because we do not have lab test confirmation, the statistics are being compiled in that way.”
As in other countries, frontline health workers in the region have been the most vulnerable to the deadly outbreak. Between 40 to 50 health workers have died in Dagestan since the beginning of the pandemic, according to estimates from Gadzhiibragimov and the region’s chief mufti. Dagestan has a population of about 3 million people. According to Russia’s health ministry, the region has 635 ICU beds and ventilators.
Doctors in the region have complained in the past weeks on social media about the lack of protective equipment, and some hospitals have not had space to treat their staff. A video of nurses hooked up to intravenous drips in a storage room in the city of Derbent went viral in early May.
Civil rights activist Ziyautdin Uvaisov, who is head of Patient Monitor, a non-profit organization that raised money to buy protective equipment for Dagestan’s doctors, told CNN that the healthcare system in the region is in a really bad state.
“We have been talking about it since 2017 but unfortunately there is a habit to sweep everything under the rug,” Uvaisov said.
He added that most of the doctors his organization interacts with say about a half of their colleagues are sick with no one to replace them as hospital wards overflow.
Dagestan’s dire situation has put the republic into the spotlight of Russia’s top-level officials. On Monday, Putin took the unusual step of chairing a special government session with Dagestani leaders.
“The situation in Dagestan is difficult and demands urgent measures,” Putin said in a video conference, ordering the military to build a 200-bed hospital to help relieve overcrowded emergency rooms.
Much of the Russian government response to the pandemic has been hindered by bureaucracy and mismanagement of regional funds. In poorer regions like Dagestan, where the average monthly wage is two times lower than nationwide, according to Russia’s state statistics agency, such foot-dragging became one of the key reasons behind severe outbreaks.
Additional payments promised by Putin to compensate for the hardships of frontline work became another grievance for health professionals.
“We’ve been at work since the very beginning of the pandemic and we’ve faithfully performed our duties — now a lot of our colleagues are [confined] inside medical institutions, fighting for their lives,” one paramedic from the city of Buinaksk in Dagestan said in a video posted by a local outlet.