WHO COVID TOLL

“We will continue to have consultations and address the concerns India has. And hopefully we can find a mutually acceptable solution,” said Samira Asma, the assistant director-general for Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact at WHO, during the release of the report on Thursday.

In a statement issued simultaneously, the Indian government outlined four grounds on which it objected to WHO’s assessment: First, mathematical projections are unnecessary since India has a robust death registration system (the data for 2020 from this was released earlier this week); second, some of the source data was obtained from media reports; third, a base used for calculations was itself an estimation and “ignored actual data”; and fourth, there were flaws in WHO’s assumptions about how the disease spread across various parts of the country.

“…WHO has released the excess mortality estimates without adequately addressing India’s concerns,” the statement said.

On May 3, the Union home ministry published the official birth and death registration numbers for 2020, showing a 6.2% increase in the number of deaths recorded in the year compared to 2019 – or 474,806 in absolute terms.

According to WHO’s data, the number of excess deaths in the country in the same period was 832,531. To be sure, the worst of the Covid-19’s impact in India was felt the following year in 2021 when the Delta variant tore through the country, inundating hospitals with more patients than they could handle and triggering an oxygen supply crisis.

Many deaths were estimated to have taken place outside of hospitals, potentially leaving them out of the official statistics – a phenomenon seen in most countries. In order to estimate this, epidemiologists and WHO used a measure known as all-cause excess mortality. The premise for this is that by determining deaths that take place on average, and comparing it with the number of deaths that took place during the pandemic years, can yield excess mortality that can be attributed to Covid-19, whether or not they were recorded officially.

The WHO estimate showed that till August 2020, a period when

India spent most of its pandemic days under a hard lockdown that began in late March, there were approximately 62,000 fewer deaths than previous years.

Deaths began to rise from September, 2020, coinciding with the first waves in many states. More than half of the excess deaths, at 2.7 million, took place during the peak of the second nationwide wave in the months of April, May and June in 2021.

The report said most of the excess deaths (84%) are estimated to be concentrated in South-East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Some 68% of excess deaths are concentrated in just 10 countries globally, it added.

Experts said WHO’s estimates mean that India alone accounts for nearly half of the unreported Covid-19 deaths. “India’s missing deaths of about 4.2 million (that is, 4.7million excess deaths of which 0.5 million were reported) accounts for about half of the global missing deaths at 9 million 15 million is estimated to be the true toll while 6 million are recorded),” said Prabhat Jha, epidemiologist and founding director of the Canada-based Centre for Global Health Research. Jha said even the data released by the government earlier this week appears to support the new estimates, if excess deaths are calculated by taking an average of deaths recorded in past years. “The 2020 deaths should be compared against an average of previous years, not just 2019. So, compared to 2018-19, there were 0.82mn excess deaths [in 2020]. ”