I wrote about how this winter was the warmest on record in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, and many other places in Russia.
This is having salubrious effects on public health: Alcohol Deaths Plummet as ‘Warmest Winter’ Hits Russia
Some 619 people died from alcohol poisoning in January 2020, down 37.3% from January 2019, Russia’s National Center for Alcohol Policy Development said Thursday. The past winter was the warmest since records began in 1891, Russia’s Hydrometeorology Center announced the same day.
My regular readers will know that alcohol consumption has long been a very strong contributing factor to many other causes of mortality in Russia. So it is no accident that according to preliminary stats, all-cause mortality fell by 4.9% y/y this January, including a near 10% fall in heart disease deaths and a 18% fall in homicides.
January probably wasn’t an anomaly, since according to blogger zemfort1983, regional Rosstat divisions report similar numbers for February (6.8% decline mortality for nine regions y/y in Feb vs. 5.8% for those same regions in Jan).
Should these improvements continue for the rest of the year – and if Corona doesn’t torpedo everything – Russia’s life expectancy for 2020 should be close to 75 years (up from 73.4 years in 2019), which is no longer that far away from the US or the V4 (78-79 years).