Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday donned a yellow hazmat suit and visited a Moscow hospital treating coronavirus patients – a rare acknowledgement of the severity of the crisis from a country that has reported numbers of cases and deaths so low that public health experts say they strain credibility.

The high-profile visit, during which Putin complimented doctors at the facility for their professionalism, comes as Russia reports just 495 virus infections. With more than two dozen nations reporting in excess of 1,000 positive diagnoses, health care professionals are skeptical that the accounting matches the reality on the ground.

Judyth Twigg, an adviser to multiple U.S. federal agencies and international organizations on Russian affairs and an expert in its public health infrastructure, says 495 "is not the right number in Russia."

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"I wouldn't put it past them to be deliberately suppressing coronavirus numbers in order to keep themselves from looking bad," she says.

Putin himself said last week that his government may not understand the full scope of the virus' spread, but he insisted that the data being released by health officials "is all objective information."

The Russian government on Monday took actions to counter the threat of the virus, allocating $95 million in emergency money to buy new ventilators and other medical devices in short supply and to direct funds to boost an economy already under the strain of U.S. and international sanctions.

But in acknowledging the threat of a global pandemic – which the director-general of the World Health Organization on Monday said is accelerating – newly appointed Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin implied that Russia has uniquely protected itself from the global fallout. The situation "remains challenging," Mishustin said, adding that in Russia "the numbers are not increasing as sharply as in other, especially European, countries."

Some in Russia appear to disagree with that sentiment. At a televised meeting Tuesday to combat the coronavirus, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reportedly urged Putin to intensify the country's response, saying that "not all regions understand" the true effect of the spread of the disease.

"The fact is that the testing volume is very low and the real picture – no one in the world knows," Sobyanin said, before being interrupted by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, who pointed out that Russia had conducted more than 100,000 tests, according to a translation of a transcript of the meeting.

Sobyanin observed that the number of infected people in a certain part of Russia where locals had traveled to countries with high rates of the disease could increase by thousands in the near future.

"Sooner or later this problem will emerge," said Sobyanin, who has become one of the most visible figures in the government's response to the virus. Putin responded that he would discuss the problem in other government meetings later Tuesday.

When organizations like Johns Hopkins University began documenting the disease's spread, Russia initially reported no cases within its more than 6 million square miles and among a population of 145 million. Numbers remained dubiously low even after the Kremlin disclosed it had established camps in Siberia to quarantine Russians and others who had fled China amid the outbreak.

Its response was, however, swift. Russia began testing en masse in early February, particularly focusing on travelers from China, Iran and South Korea coming through its airports. It shut down its 2,600-mile border with China in late January and set up the isolated quarantine zones, which many public health experts believe genuinely mitigated the spread of the virus.

Yet Russia maintains it has experienced only one death and nearly two dozen cases of recovery among those who received a positive diagnosis.

Several factors contribute to artificially low numbers in Russia, says Twigg, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Russia and Eurasia Program and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. An endemic culture exists among low-level bureaucrats against drawing negative attention to their offices or constituencies, as would be the case if one were to identify a spike in coronavirus cases.

"There are plenty of incentives across the board in Russia's political system to avoid being the bearer of bad news," Twigg says.

Russia's ability to test for the disease is also fundamentally flawed.

The domestically produced kits Russia's public health officials have used to carry out the tests are not as sensitive as other international alternatives, spiking the likelihood of flawed results which would heavily skew toward false negatives.

Other corners of the Russian government continue to display an apparent disregard for the seriousness of the virus. The Kremlin has indicated it plans to proceed with a public vote next month to approve new changes to the country's constitution that could extend Putin's hold on power, despite public health concerns. Russia's electoral commission on Friday said it plans to spread the vote out over several weeks in response to concerns about crowds gathering.