How Russia’s Dagestan ignored ‘hundreds’ of coronavirus deaths

Ibragim Yevtemirov saw the corpses with his own eyes. At the start, they died in twos and threes. Then there were five or six a day. At the peak, 13 bodies passed through the hospital daily.

The surgeon says doctors could see catastrophe closing in on them like a “violent and thunderous wall”. But locals in Khasavyurt, Dagestan’​s main market town near the border with Chechnya, wrote the virus off as a Masonic conspiracy. They didn’t trust the federal government – there was history here – and by extension the doctors. They continued to meet, to embrace each other, and, invariably, to wind up in hospital.