Tag: India

An updated estimate for COVID mortalities in India puts the true number at over three million, which is so much higher than the official estimate of around a million that it would raise the World Health Organization’s official global death toll by 50%.

When the COVID Delta wave hit India over early to mid-2021, hospitals were filled beyond capacity, oxygen ran out, and community networks for tending to the dead were overwhelmed. At the time, government reporting put the death toll at under a million.

However, other sources estimated that the toll was far worse than this, likely in the millions. A more accurate measure of COVID mortality in India puts that number at 3.2 million people, according to a paper published in Science. 

“The analyses find that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021 were six to seven times higher than reported officially,” the international team of researchers wrote.

“You have to put that into context,” said Associate Professor of Economics Paul Novosad, co-author of the paper. “At the time that we were writing this, India was reporting about half a million official COVID deaths, the World Health Organization was reporting about 4 to 5 million COVID deaths globally, so just this adjustment – just correctly counting the deaths in India – is going to raise the global mortality count of COVID by almost 50%.”

The team looked at all-causes mortality from an independent survey of 140 000 adults, and from two government data sources including deaths reported in health facilities and registered deaths in 10 Indian states. Comparing these to previous years without COVID, they found that total deaths increased by 26% to 29% in the COVID period compared to total deaths in past years. This range was consistent across separate data sources, the researchers wrote.

“We’re triangulating on this number from a lot of different directions and have broad agreement regarding the range that we’re finding,” said Novosad.

Novosad’s work incorporates many novel types of data, including measures of well-being generated from satellite images, data collected by government programs, and archival administrative records not previously used for policy design. His research lab, which focuses on India, has created an open source data platform to support socioeconomic research in India and the developing world.

“A large part of my research agenda is based on finding new, 21st-century data sources and mobilising them for better research and policy,” he said.

Novosad believes this work can help answer many  critical questions about how governments and organisations can respond to the global pandemic.

“The decisions you make are better if they’re based on true facts about the world. If you don’t have data, then you just have to work on stories and impressions,” he said. “We need an empirical foundation for this kind of work.”

Source: Dartmouth College

Excess deaths in India during the pandemic could be as much as 10 times the official COVID toll, likely making it modern India’s worst human tragedy, according to a new report.

A report published by Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s former chief economic adviser, and two other researchers at the Center for Global Development and Harvard University, estimates that between 3.4 million and 4.7 million excess deaths have occurred in the country from January 2020 to June 2021.

The report said that the true toll was likely “an order of magnitude higher”, and the official count could have missed deaths with overwhelmed and disrupted healthcare systems, particularly during the devastating virus surge earlier this year. It also has recently come to light that the Indian government did not count any deaths due to a lack of oxygen.

The researchers from used three different data sources to estimate India’s excess all-cause mortality. They extrapolated death registrations from seven states, accounting for half of India’s population, but published data for annual mortality surveys are only available up to 2019. Second, the researchers applied international estimates of age-specific infection fatality rates to data from two countrywide antibody tests, also called sero surveys. Third, they looked at India’s thrice yearly consumer survey of 900 000 individuals, which also records deaths in households.

Taken together, the researchers arrived at an estimate of of 3.4 million to 4.7 million – about 10 times higher than India’s official COVID death toll of 414 000. This was also considerably higher than other estimates by epidemiologists, who estimated excess deaths were between five and seven times higher. Not all these deaths were caused by COVID and an estimation of the actual death toll by the disease would be difficult to give, said Subramanian. 

The data implied that four million people had died in the pandemic in India, according to Dr Subramanian.

“Two of our three estimates measure all-cause mortality and not COVID deaths. Our second measure is a bit closer to a number of [actual] COVID deaths, but it is only one of three estimates,” Dr Subramanian told the BBC.

The researchers also said that the first wave last year appeared to have been more lethal than what was popularly believed. Mortality only seemed to be moderate because it was “spread out in time and space”.

Dr Subramanian said one of the conclusions might be that “India has not been an outlier” and has had “mortality not dissimilar from countries of comparable size and infections”.

The researchers said the most “critical take-away, regardless of the sources and estimates”, was that actual deaths during the pandemic were “likely to be far greater than the official count”.

“The true deaths are likely to be in several millions, not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since the partition and independence.” The 1947 Partition of the British-ruled Indian subcontinent into independent India and Pakistan resulted in up to 1 million people being killed in violence between Hindu and Muslim gangs.

Source: BBC News