The revenues of Russia’s Funeral Industry, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, have grown by almost a billion rubles (around $14,000,000). For example, if the Moscow State Budgetary Institution “Ritual” earned 3.4 billion rubles in 2019, then in 2020 the income amounted to 4.2 billion rubles.
Incomes grow in proportion to mortality and the number of burials. Compared to the pre-pandemic time, their number increased by 25-30 percent.
From January to September 2019, 77.7 thousand burials were carried out in Moscow, for the same period in 2020 – 87.2 thousand, for 9 months of 2021 – 85.5 thousand, RBC reports.
“This growth is associated with the so-called waves of a pandemic. At the peak of the first wave in 2020, we could carry out burials of up to 600 bodies daily. This is compared with 300 in the non-crisis period,” says the head of the funeral service GBU “Ritual” Artem Yekimov.
According to Evdokimov’s observation, with the onset of the pandemic, people more often began to cremate the dead . If in the pre-pandemic time cremation accounted for 58 percent of the total volume of burials, then in 2020-21 the share reached 72 percent.
In Moscow, for the first time since October 7, the number of infected people dropped below 4 thousand cases per day.
In St. Petersburg, 3,144 coronavirus infections were confirmed, 80 deaths, in the Moscow region – 2,955 patients died.
In total, 9,070,674 cases of coronavirus infection have been registered in Russia since the beginning of the pandemic, 255,386 died and 7,784,585 were discharged, including 29,821 were discharged in the last day, of which 6,473 recovered in Moscow.
