A latest research based on the independent nationally representative surveys and models revealed that India’s Covid-19 fatalities, may have topped 32 lakh - about 7 times more than the official death toll of 4,83,463 declared by the government as on January 8, 2022.
A research paper by IIM-A professor Chinmay Tumbe and his co-author Paul Novosad, Economics Professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover, US showed that Covid-19 constituted 29 per cent of the overall deaths occurred between June 2020-July 2021, that worked out to a figure of 32 lakh deaths, of which 27 lakh had occurred during the Second wave of April-July 2021.
The researchers used an independent nationally representative survey of 140,000 adults and compared Covid mortality during 2020 and 2021 Covid-19 viral waves with the expected all-cause mortality. When compared with pre-pandemic periods, all-cause mortality was 27 per cent higher in 0.2 million health facilities and 26 per cent higher in civil registration deaths in 10 States. Both the increases occurred mostly in 2021.
“The analyses find that India’s cumulative Covid deaths by September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially,” the researchers noted in the paper, published in the
Three orthogonal sources
Explaining the method for calculating the excess deaths, researchers used 3 orthogonal sources. This include a representative CVoter survey which was contacted over 100,000 households in 2020–21. Second, excess deaths reported in health facilities through HMIS (hospital management information system) and third, total deaths from civil registration systems in 10 states.
“All three suggest total mortality was 20–30 per cent higher between June 1 2020–July 1 2021 than it would have been based on prior years’ mortality rates, suggesting about 2.7 million more deaths than normal,” noted Novosad explaining the findings.
Multiple data sources and different analytical approaches all agree that there were over 2 million Covid deaths in India through summer of 2021. “India alone accounts for a huge share of global Covid deaths. WHO should be updating their global numbers taking this into account,” Novosad noted.
Under-reporting
During an interview with BusinessLine just before the Omicron variant surfaced in November 2021, Tumbe had stated that India was one of the worst-hit nations globally in terms of livelihood lost and mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “India’s official data show about 450,000 deaths. But we have been using a flawed matrix of death reporting. Under-reporting is true across the world, but our paper shows how big the reporting is flawed in India,” Tumbe had said.
Based on the estimates of 31 to 34 lakh deaths from the independent COVID Tracker survey, the national Covid-19 death rate per million population ranges 2,300-2,500. “This would put India’s death rate per million population just below the range reported in Brazil (2800/million) or Colombia (2500/million), where registration of deaths is far more complete,” the paper points out.
The research also looks into the dissimilarity in severity of infections during the first and second waves of 2020 and 2021, respectively. “Both the 2020 and 2021 viral waves were characterised by widespread (and, for 2021, mostly uncontrolled) multi-generational transmission of the virus within households, with high levels of antibodies detected,” it said seeking for further research to look into India’s significantly higher Covid death rate in 2021 versus lower than expected death rate in 2020.
Tumbe’s research also notes that tracking death rates would be essential to understanding the effects of the Omicron wave, which is currently underway in India, or future viral variants. India reported 1,41,986 new cases on January 8 with daily positivity rate above 9 per cent. The country has reported total 3,071 Omicron cases with 1203 recoveries across 27 States.
“If our findings are confirmed, this may require substantial upward revision of WHO’s estimates of cumulative global Covid mortality, which as of January 1, 2022, stood at 5.4 million,” the research noted.