ABSTRACT
Accurately counting the human cost of the COVID-19 at both the national and regional level is a policy priority. The Russian Federation currently reports one of the higher COVID-19 mortality rates in the world; but estimates of mortality differ significantly. Using a statistical method accounting for changes in the population age structure, we present the first national and regional estimates of excess mortality for 2021; calculations of excess mortality by age, gender, and urban/rural status for 2020; and mean remaining years of life expectancy lost at the regional level. We estimate that there were 351,158 excess deaths in 2020 and 678,022 in 2021 in the Russian Federation; and, in 2020, around 2.0 years of life expectancy lost. While the Russian Federation exhibits very high levels of excess mortality compared to other countries, there is a wide degree of regional variation: in 2021, excess deaths expressed as a percentage of expected deaths at the regional level range from 27% to 52%. Life expectancy loss is generally greater for males; while excess mortality is greater in urban areas. For Russia as whole, an average person who died due to the pandemic in 2020 would have otherwise lived for a further 14 more years (and as high as 18 years in some regions), disproving the widely held view that excess mortality during the pandemic period was concentrated among those with few years of life remaining-especially for females. At a regional level, less densely populated, more remote regions, rural regions appear to have fared better regarding excess mortality and life expectancy loss-however, a part of this differential could be owing to measurement issues. The calculations demonstrate more clearly the true degree of the human cost of the pandemic in the Russian Federation.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Male , Female , Humans , Life Expectancy , Russia/epidemiology , MortalityABSTRACT
The article provides a systematic review of the main, existing methodologies of the global monitoring and forecasting of socio-political destabilization. A systematic analysis of the correlation between the forecasts of destabilization generated by these systems and the actual levels of destabilization observed in the respective countries has been carried out. The analysis shows that the forecast, based on the assumption that the level of destabilization in each country in the following year will be proportional to the actual level of destabilization of the current year, turns out, in all cases, to be more predictive than the forecasts made on the basis of any of the considered indices of the risk of destabilization (at least for all cases when the relevant forecasts were published). At the same time, it is shown that, before the Arab Spring, the indices we considered still performed some useful function, allowing us to identify not so much countries with a high risk of destabilization as those countries with particularly low risks of this kind. However, in 2010-2011, all destabilization risk indices had a very serious failure. High index values not only turned out to be not-very-good predictors of a high degree of the actual destabilization in 2011, but also low index values turned out to be bad predictors of a low degree of actual destabilization. As a result, all destabilization risk indices in 2010/2011 showed extremely low statistically-insignificant correlations between the expected and observed levels of destabilization, which can be attributed to the anomalous wave of 2011 launched by the events of the Arab Spring. As we have shown in several ways, the predictive ability of indices had been restored to some extent, again becoming statistically significant after 2011, but it has not returned to the level observed before the Arab Spring. This confirms the conclusions of our previous work that the Arab Spring in 2011 acted as a trigger for the global phase transition, resulting in the World System changing into a qualitatively new state in which we observe some new patterns that were not taken into account by the systems developed before the Arab Spring. Thus, the existing systems of forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization have lost the last “competitive advantages” over the method of simple extrapolation. There are grounds to believe that the pandemic of the coronavirus infection COVID-19 may lead to an additional decrease in the prognostic ability of the indices we have examined. All this, of course, suggests the need to develop a new generation of systems for forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization. В статье приводится систематический обзор основных методологий глобального мониторинга и прогнозирования социально-политической дестабилизации. Проведен анализ корреляции между прогнозами дестабилизации, генерировавшимися данными системами, и актуально наблюдавшимися уровнями дестабилизации в соответствующих странах. Прогноз, построенный на допущении о том, что уровень дестабилизации в каждой данной стране в следующем году будет пропорционален актуальному уровню дестабилизации в этом году, оказывается во всех случаях обладающим большей прогностической силой, чем прогнозы на базе любого из рассмотренных нами индексов риска дестабилизации (по крайней мере, для всех случаев, когда соответствующие прогнозы были опубликованы). Вместе с тем показано, что до Арабской весны рассмотренные нами индексы все-таки выполняли некоторую полезную функцию, позволяя идентифицировать не столько страны с высоким риском дестабилизации, сколько с особо низкими рисками такого рода. Однако в 2010-2011 годах все индексы рисков дестабилизации дали серьезный сбой. Высокие значения индексов не только оказались не очень хорошими предикторами высокой степени актуальной дестабилизации в 2011 году, но и низкие значения индексов оказались плохими предикторами низкой степени актуальной дестабилизации. В итоге все индексы рисков дестабилизации в 2010-2011 годах продемонстрировали крайне низкие статистически незначимые корреляции между ожидаемыми и наблюдаемыми уровнями дестабилизации, что нельзя не связать с аномальной волной 2011 года, запущенной событиями Арабской весны. Как показано нами несколькими способами, после 2011 года предиктивная способность индексов до некоторой степени восстанавливается, вновь становится статистически значимой, но на уровень, предшествующий Арабской весне, так и не выходит. Это подтверждает выводы наших предыдущих работ о том, что Арабская весна в 2011 году выступила в качестве триггера глобального фазового перехода, в результате которого Мир-Система пришла в качественно новое состояние, в рамках которого стали наблюдаться новые закономерности, не учитываемые системами, разработанными до Арабской весны. Таким образом, существующие системы прогнозирования рисков социально-политической дестабилизации утратили последние «конкуретные преимущества» перед методом простой экстраполяции. Имеются основания предполагать, что пандемия коронавирусной инфекции COVID-19 может привести к дополнительному снижению прогностической способности рассмотренных нами индексов. Все это, конечно же, говорит о необходимости разработки нового поколения систем прогнозирования рисков социально-политической дестабилизации.
ABSTRACT
The article provides a systematic review of the main, existing methodologies of the global monitoring and forecasting of socio-political destabilization. A systematic analysis of the correlation between the forecasts of destabilization generated by these systems and the actual levels of destabilization observed in the respective countries has been carried out. The analysis shows that the forecast, based on the assumption that the level of destabilization in each country in the following year will be proportional to the actual level of destabilization of the current year, turns out, in all cases, to be more predictive than the forecasts made on the basis of any of the considered indices of the risk of destabilization (at least for all cases when the relevant forecasts were published). At the same time, it is shown that, before the Arab Spring, the indices we considered still performed some useful function, allowing us to identify not so much countries with a high risk of destabilization as those countries with particularly low risks of this kind. However, in 2010-2011, all destabilization risk indices had a very serious failure. High index values not only turned out to be not-very-good predictors of a high degree of the actual destabilization in 2011, but also low index values turned out to be bad predictors of a low degree of actual destabilization. As a result, all destabilization risk indices in 2010/2011 showed extremely low statistically-insignificant correlations between the expected and observed levels of destabilization, which can be attributed to the anomalous wave of 2011 launched by the events of the Arab Spring. As we have shown in several ways, the predictive ability of indices had been restored to some extent, again becoming statistically significant after 2011, but it has not returned to the level observed before the Arab Spring. This confirms the conclusions of our previous work that the Arab Spring in 2011 acted as a trigger for the global phase transition, resulting in the World System changing into a qualitatively new state in which we observe some new patterns that were not taken into account by the systems developed before the Arab Spring. Thus, the existing systems of forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization have lost the last "competitive advantages" over the method of simple extrapolation. There are grounds to believe that the pandemic of the coronavirus infection COVID-19 may lead to an additional decrease in the prognostic ability of the indices we have examined. All this, of course, suggests the need to develop a new generation of systems for forecasting the risks of socio-political destabilization.