The Ministry of Labor announced the loss of a quarter of WWII veterans in a pandemic

From April 2020 to October of this year in Russia, the number of participants and veterans of the Great Patriotic War decreased from 1.21 million to 896.8 thousand people, the losses amounted to 312.6 thousand people, or 26%. This was reported by Vedomosti with reference to the data of the Ministry of Labor.

Prior to this, the reduction was not so rapid. At the beginning of 2019, the participants and veterans of the Great Patriotic War in Russia were 1.28 million people. In 2020, the Ministry of Labor recalculated upward the number of widows of the disabled and participants in the Second World War. However, even taking into account these changes, the dynamics of the last year and a half shows that the reduction in participants and veterans of the war has accelerated by about 1.5 times.

Until 2019, mortality among people over 85 was declining. In 2020, the situation worsened in all age groups over 30, said Boris Ovchinnikov, founder of the Data Insight research agency. According to him, especially sharp jumps in mortality were observed in women over 60 and men over 65.

For the category over 85 years old, the age-specific mortality rate in 2019 was 164 per 1,000 people, last year it was 190 people, follows from Rosstat data. This year, the figure could reach 209 people, that is, 27% more than before the coronavirus pandemic, demographer Aleksey Raksha estimated.