Here’s our Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi, who has just filed her latest despatch on the situation in India and that report of a huge number of uncounted Covid deaths:
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. Using official statistics, India’s per capita death rathe is 0.3, compared with 2 for countries such as the UK, US and Brazil, where infection rates are lower. “This shows that India was not an outlier when it came to Covid mortality,” Arvind Subramanian, one of the authors of the report, said.
Subramanian emphasised that all three data sources used in the report have “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.”
Read more of Hannah Ellis-Petersen’s report here: India’s excess deaths during Covid ‘could be 10 times official toll’