A new study reveals that the authentic estimate of Covid-19 deaths in India after the devastating second wave is close to 10 times the official count of the government.
As per the official figures, India recorded more than 414,000 coronavirus deaths, but various researchers and scientists have said that the number only undercounts the real death toll.
The study suggests that the excess deaths or the number of people who died beyond what is normally expected lies between 3.4 million and 4.7 million from January 2020 to June 2021.
The report was released this Tuesday by Arvind Subramanian, a former chief economic adviser for the Indian government, and researchers at the Center for Global Development and Harvard University.
The study says that the real death count was likely to be 10 times the official count. “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 had 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 coronavirus in India alongside global COVID-19 fatality rates; and an economic survey of nearly 900,000 people done three times a year.
The researchers did caution that each method had drawbacks, such as the economic survey omitting the causes of death.
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The researchers instead, looked at the deaths from all causes and compared that data to mortality in previous years, a method which is widely considered as an accurate metric.
Researchers also cautioned that coronavirus prevalence and COVID-19 deaths in the seven states – Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh might not translate to all of India, since the virus could have spread more in urban states than in rural ones and since healthcare quality varies greatly around the country.
While other countries are believed to have undercounted deaths in the pandemic, India is believed to have a greater gap because it has the world’s second-largest population, at nearly 1.4 billion, and not all deaths were recorded even before the pandemic.
The Associated Press got the report reviewed by Dr. Jacob John, who studies viruses at the Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India. He said that it underscored the devastating impact COVID-19 had on the country’s underprepared healthcare system.
“This analysis reiterates the observations of other fearless investigative journalists that have highlighted the massive undercounting of deaths,” he said.
The report also mentions that about 2 million citizens died during the first wave of infections in 2020 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.
Over the period of past couple months, various Indian states have increased their COVID-19 death toll on finding thousands of previously unreported cases, and this raises the concern that many more deaths were not officially recorded.
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Many journalists have also reported a number much higher than the official records.
India saw a devastating number of deaths during the months of Aprial and May as the second wave of Coronavirus arrived. Hospitals ran out of oxygen and several thousand deaths due to the lack of oxygen were reported. While, several patients were turned away from the hospitals, many patients died at home untested.