The Russian healthcare system turned out to be better than the American one
American healthcare has demonstrated that it is unable to cope with the large influx of patients.
Virologist and head of the MIPT genome engineering laboratory Pavel Volchkov spoke about this in an interview with Izvestia, answering the question why in the United States there is such a difficult situation with the spread of coronavirus infection and such a large number of cases.
According to him, several factors came together in the United States: a huge country with extremely intense internal and external movement, a large number of tests and the late introduction of quarantine measures.
“And fourth: the US healthcare system itself. If you are a wealthy person, you will probably receive the best medical care in the world. And as a business system it works well. But in principle they cannot treat a large number of people. I think that after this pandemic, the American authorities will reconsider a lot in their healthcare system,”
In turn, the publication asked whether it could be concluded that Russian healthcare is still coping with the pandemic.
“We definitely want to move away from the Italian model: we avoid so many seriously ill patients per unit of time. That is, now in Russia everything is being done to ensure that any seriously ill patient is provided with sufficient medical care. I think that now our doctors are definitely doing a better job than Spanish, Italian, and American ones. But we have a lot to learn from Germany, South Korea and China,” says the virologist.
He also noted that the situation in the Russian Federation is different compared to Belarus and Sweden, which abandoned strict quarantine measures.
“It is impossible to compare these countries with Russia; their population and area are too small. I don’t know anything about Belarus, but in Sweden, with a population of 10 million people, the number of people infected at the moment is 8,4 thousand, 687 people have died. And the population, I emphasize, is 14 times smaller than ours! And in Russia there are 76 deaths. It turns out that the mortality rate there is now 8%. And we have 0,7%. I think this picture is quite indicative,” Volchkov noted.
Russian version :: Read in English: The Russian healthcare system is better than the American one.