Indias COVID death toll likely 10 times the official count, research says

India’s death toll from COVID-19 may be up
to ten times higher than the official count of nearly 415,000, making the country the
world’s worst-affected from the coronavirus since the onset of the
pandemic, according to an American research group.

In a study published on Tuesday, which
analysed data from the start of the pandemic to June this year, the Centre for
Global Development estimates between 3.4 to 4.7 million people have died from
the infection in the country.

It is the highest estimated death toll so
far for the nation of 1.3 billion people, which was crippled by a ferocious
wave of cases, fuelled by the more contagious Delta Variant, in April and May.

“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 research said.

Also Read | Europe crosses 50 million COVID-19 cases mark: Report

Violent bloodshed followed the
sub-continent’s partition in 1947 into Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-dominated
Pakistan, with some estimates projecting up to two million people died in the sectarian
crisis.

The country’s official death toll due to the virus is the
third highest in the world, behind only Brazil (over 542,000) and the United
States (over 609,000). India has logged the highest single-day rise in cases
and deaths in the world – over 400,000 and 4,500 respectively.

But experts have doubted both the number of
infections and the death toll that the health authorities have reported. A
number of Indian states have revised their respective tolls recently, adding
thousands of “backlog” deaths.

The Center for Global Development report
was based on estimating “excess mortality”, the number of extra
people who died compared with pre-crisis figures.

Also Read | US issues new travel advisory for India and Pakistan, urges caution while travelling

The authors, including former chief economic advisor Arvind
Subramanian, did this partly by
analysing death registrations in some states as well as a recurring national economic
study.

They also compared surveys of the spread of
COVID-19 in India with international death rates.

The researchers, which also included a
Harvard University expert, acknowledged that estimating mortality with
statistical confidence was difficult.

“(But) all estimates suggest that the
death toll from the pandemic is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than
the official count,” they said.

Christophe Guilmoto, a specialist in Indian
demography at France’s Research Institute for Development, this month estimated
that the death toll was nearer 2.2 million by late May.

Also Read | 7.5 million Moderna vaccine doses for India await indemnity consensus

India’s death rate per million was nearly
half the world average and Guilmoto said “such a low figure contradicts
the apparent severity of a crisis that has struck most Indian families across
the country”.

Guilmoto’s team concluded that only one
coronavirus death in seven was recorded.

A model by the US-based Institute for
Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated that the COVID toll could be more than
1.25 million.

India’s health ministry last month slammed
The Economist magazine for publishing a story that said excess deaths were
between five and seven times higher than the official toll, calling it
“speculative” and “misinformed”.

A World Health Organization (WHO) report in May
said up to three times more people had died around the globe during the
pandemic — from coronavirus or other causes — than indicated by official
statistics.