According to the World Health Organization, 5.45 million people are estimated to have died in the pandemic so far. Based on these estimates the WHO has been rather critical of countries that are reporting rather low death counts.
Jha, whose team released a new India analysis today, says: ” I think it does call for a recalibration of the global numbers plus saying, ‘What the heck is going on in India?.” At the end of 2021, India said that about 480,000 people died from SARS-CoV-2 infections that year. India’s unusually low death rate from COVID-19 was true at first, but now Jha and his colleagues suspect that the numbers being reported from India are too low.
They looked at data from an independent polling company that called nearly 140,000 people across the country and asked if anyone in their home had died from COVID-19. They also looked at government reports from hospitals and other places that care for people, and they looked at officially recorded deaths. Early on, Jha said that his low estimate was based on the first wave of infections in the fall of 2020, which may not have been as deadly as the Delta variant that caused India’s huge surge in the spring of 2021.
People in the country had a hard time getting their death certificates even before the pandemic.
The Indian government is supposedly attempting to hide the number of COVID deaths, says Jha. Because the government hasn’t released data from a system called “Sample Registration System”.
Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist at Princeton University, points out that SRS data haven’t been released since 2018 before the pandemic, but that this might simply be a sign of a disorganized system. He says that almost every country undercounts how many people died from COVID-19. As he says, ” I think all governments want to downplay the degree of deaths.” He is, however, slightly taken aback by the new numbers reported by the Indian government. “I don’t believe in exceptionalism of any kind unless it’s well justified”
Laxminarayan’s team conducted a study last month that looked at the Indian district of Chennai and found that the number of people who died because of the pandemic was “greatly underestimated.” People who study viruses say that estimates by Jha’s team are also “in broad agreement” with two other studies that looked at the same time period.
