A medical specialist wearing protective gear pushes a person on a wheelchair at a hospital for patients infected with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia July 2, 2021. REUTERS
MOSCOW — Russia reported 20,564 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, including 1,661 in Moscow and 1,481 in St. Petersburg, which took the national tally to 6,747,087.
The Russian coronavirus task force said 762 more deaths of coronavirus patients had been confirmed in the past 24 hours, bringing the official death toll to 176,044.
Rosstat, the government statistics agency, keeps a separate count from the pandemic task force and says it has recorded about 315,000 deaths related to COVID-19 between last April and June this year.
Russia has reported about 463,000 excess deaths from April 2020 to June this year, according to Reuters calculations based on the latest Rosstat data. Some epidemiologists say excess deaths are the best way to measure the real death toll from COVID-19.