Ordinary Russians are mostly skeptical, with some loudly questioning, official figures released by the Putin government saying Russia has only 306 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and only one death among its population of 146 million persons.

In contrast, tiny and neighboring Estonia with a population of only 1.3 million also has 306 confirmed COVID-19 cases (no deaths), as of Saturday afternoon according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Russia, however, has admitted a huge spike in influenza or flu cases, leading skeptics to conclude Russia is counting confirmed COVID-19 cases as merely flu cases.

Russia did shut down its 4,000 kilometer-long border with China on January 30, a move the Kremlin said was one of the keys to the low spread of COVID-19 infections. Russia's mammoth border with China, however, is poorly patrolled, mainly because of the warm relationship between both neighbors. The lack of strict border controls by both sides meant Chinese and Russians were going about their business despite Russia's ostensible border quarantine.

Anastasia Vasilyeva, a doctor for Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny and leader of the Alliance of Doctors union, made headlines with a number of videos where she claims Russian officials are covering-up the real coronavirus numbers by using pneumonia and acute respiratory infection as a diagnosis for COVID-19.

"You see, they said the first coronavirus patient that died, that the cause of death was thrombosis," said Vasilyeva to CNN. "That's obvious, nobody dies from coronavirus itself, they die from the complications, so it's very easy to manipulate this."

Russia's spy agencies and censors have been busy deleting social media posts claiming president Vladimir Putin is covering up the true toll being inflicted by COVID-19 on the Russian population. In early March, the Federal Security Service (Russia's version of the CIA and successor to the KGB) and internet watchdog, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), erased a viral social media post claiming the real number of COVID-19 cases in Russia was 20,000 and that Putin was covering it up.

News reports of shortages in protective equipment among doctors and healthcare workers are also stoking rumors all it not well in Russia's fight against COVID-19. Some medical experts doubt the reliability of Russia's coronavirus testing system, which depends only on a single laboratory, which is Vector in Novosibirsk, located in the southwestern part of remote and snowy Siberia. Moscow is located 11,000 km to the west of Siberia.

Vector's coronavirus testing system is the only one approved by Putin to test for SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), the virus that causes COVID-19. It has a lower sensitivity than other virus tests, a flaw raises concerns about false negatives, said a report by the PCR.News, a media outlet for doctors and healthcare professionals.

The reliability of Vector's testing kit was brought into question by David Berov, the first confirmed coronavirus patient in Moscow. Berov later revealed his second test using the Vector kit showed a negative result, while the first and third tested positive for coronavirus.

"The virus was confirmed in my third test, it was not seen in my blood but was in my saliva," wrote Berov on March 5 on Instagram. "As I was told, they could barely see it so that's why they were in doubt for so long."

Western medical experts also point out Russia is conducting far fewer tests than it should have considering the size of its population. Russia has made 133,101 tests, which seems impressive since only China, Italy, and South Korea have made more tests.

But what's puzzling and astounding Western experts is that with only 306 confirmed 306 cases, Russia's ratio of positive cases to the number of tests is the second lowest in the world, at 0.21%. Only the tiny United Arab Emirates comes in lower at 0.11%, based on data from Oxford University.

That number is unbelievable when set against results for the United Kingdom and Norway, for example. The U.K. has done 64,600 tests and has more than 3,000 cases. Norway's 44,000 tests have uncovered 1,700 cases.

"If they have done that amount of testing, it is remarkably low," said Paul Hunter, a professor of health protection at Britain's University of East Anglia, told ABC News. "But clearly there are both suspicious and non-suspicious explanations for that. I would be very pushed to say that data is false based just on the numbers."