[Study gives most comprehensive
picture yet of true toll of pandemic in India]
The study, carried out by the
US-based Center for Global Development, examined three different sources of
data to piece together one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of the
pandemic in India.
“India’s official Covid death count
as of end-June 2021 is 400,000,” the report says. “The reality is, of course,
catastrophically worse … What is tragically clear is that too many people, in
the millions rather than hundreds of thousands, may have died.”
Excess deaths are a calculation of
how many more people are dying across a defined period of time than usual.
While not all excess deaths that occurred during the pandemic would be due to
Covid, it is likely that a significant proportion were.
The report acknowledges that
establishing an accurate Covid-19 death toll may “prove elusive” but that such
a toll “is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count”.
India’s second wave, which hit in
March, was the most devastating. People died in the streets and outside
hospital gates unable to get a bed or oxygen, and the healthcare system was
brought to the brink of collapse.
However, using the data, the
researchers concluded that the first wave “was also more lethal than is widely
believed” and that about 2 million people may have died in the first wave
alone.
Arvind Subramanian, one of the
authors of the report, said: “After the first wave, which was more spread out,
there was a sense that India had escaped the worst because there was this
undercounting of deaths, and that led to a culture of complacency. But in the
second wave, with all the horrendous images that we saw, that really galvanised
Indian society to get to the bottom of the numbers.
“Much of this is thanks to the
heroic efforts of Indian journalists and civil society who tirelessly and
furiously recorded deaths and forced state governments to release accurate data
and revise their figures.”
State governments and local
administrations across India have been accused of purposefully undercounting
Covid-19 deaths, while the stigma attached to the virus also prevented many
people getting tested, so many deaths also went unrecorded as Covid-19
fatalities.
Following public pressure and calls
for accountability, several Indian states have recently revised their Covid-19
mortality figures, leading to a sharp increase in the official death toll.
In order to draw together a more
accurate picture than that reflected in official figures, the researchers used
three data sources: 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 three times a year.
The conclusions drawn from
comparing the data undermine India’s claim to have one of the world’s lowest
deaths per capita. “This shows that India was not an outlier when it came to
Covid mortality,” Subramanian said.
He emphasised that all three data
sources used in the report had “merits and shortcomings” but said they all
depicted a relatively similar pattern for excess deaths. He also emphasised
that the data sources only went up to May, so the full impact of the second
wave that has continued into June and July would not be reflected.
“Knowing the true death toll of the
pandemic is important for so many reasons,” Subramanian said. “How can we have
a basic understanding of the impact of Covid without knowing how many people
died and where they died? Accurate data is the only way we can prepare a fully
fledged response to the pandemic in the future.”
