Moscow's city government on Sunday published so-called "all-cause mortality" data for April, which is the total deaths registered in the city from any cause during that period.
Analyzing that data shows that Moscow registered over 1,700 more deaths during April than the average for that month in the previous five years.
Anton Vaganov/Reuters
However, the same data also suggests that Russia's real death toll from the virus may be still relatively low, particularly when compared with other countries with similarly large epidemics.
The data is seen as potentially offering an explanation for a riddle that puzzled experts, that is, why does Russia, despite now having the world's second-largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases, have one of the lowest death rates -- 2,418 among 262,843 confirmed cases.
Experts around the world believe that looking at total mortality data in countries during the pandemic offers the best picture of the coronavirus' real toll, given the wildly differing methods of counting virus deaths from country to country.