Research: India’s pandemic toll likely to be millions
Coronavirus deaths likely to be 10 times the official number
India’s excess deaths during the pandemic could be a staggering 10 times the official Covid-19 toll, likely making it modern India’s worst human tragedy, according to the most comprehensive research yet on the ravages of the virus in the south Asian country.
Most experts believe India’s official toll of more than 414,000 dead is a vast undercount, but the government has dismissed those concerns as exaggerated and misleading.
The report released yesterday estimated excess deaths to be between 3 million to 4.7 million between January 2020 and June 2021. It said an accurate figure may “prove elusive” but the true death toll “is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count”.
The report, published by Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s former chief economic adviser, and two other researchers at the Centre for Global Development and Harvard University, said the count could have missed deaths in overwhelmed hospitals or while health care was delayed or disrupted, especially during the devastating peak surge earlier this year.
“True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since Partition and independence,” the report said.
The report on India’s virus toll used three calculation methods: data from the civil registration system that records births and deaths across seven states, blood tests showing the prevalence of the virus in India alongside global Covid-19 fatality rates, and an economic survey of nearly 900,000 people done thrice a year.
Researchers cautioned that each method had weaknesses, such as the economic survey omitting the causes of death.
Instead, researchers looked at deaths from all causes and compared that data to mortality in previous years — a method widely considered an accurate metric.
The report also estimated nearly 2 million Indians died during the first surge in infections last year and said not “grasping the scale of the tragedy in real time” may have “bred collective complacency that led to the horrors” of the surge earlier this year.
Scientists say this new information is helping them better understand how Covid-19 spread in India.
Murad Banaji, who studies mathematics at Middlesex University and has been looking at India’s Covid-19 mortality figures, said the recent data has confirmed some of the suspicions about undercounting.
Banaji said the new data also shows the virus wasn’t restricted to urban centres, as contemporary reports had indicated, but that India’s villages were also badly impacted.
“A question we should ask is if some of those deaths were avoidable,” he said.