India: deaths from covid-19 reportedly up to 10 times higher than officially recognized | According to a study by the Center for Global Development

A group of American researchers have warned that the actual number of deaths caused by covid-19 in India it might be up to ten times higher than the nearly 415,000 recorded in the official balance sheet. According to specialists from the Center for Global Development in a study, this figure would be between 3.4 and 4.7 million people since the start of the pandemic.

Although various experts have long warned that the toll is vastly underestimated in this country of 1.3 billion people, the figure calculated by the Center for Global Development is the highest presented so far.

“Actual deaths are likely to be in the millions, not hundreds of thousands, which would make it the India’s biggest humanitarian tragedy since independence“, said the researchers, who took into account the dramatic increase in cases and deaths between April and May that has occurred in India since Extension of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, identified there for the first time.

According to specialists, errors in the official death toll from the coronavirus in India, which reports a total of 414,000 deaths – making it the third country with the most deaths after the United States (609,000) and Brazil (542,000) -, It is not due to deliberate manipulation but is linked to the high stress levels of the health services, which are saturated.

An example of the latter is the delay in uploading data, as in recent weeks several Indian states have revised their balance sheets and added thousands of late deaths.

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The Global Development Research Center, in which Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser to the Indian government, as well as a Harvard expert, is based on “excess mortality” study, that is to say the number of additional deaths compared to the period preceding the health crisis.

Although the study authors recognized that it is difficult to calculate mortality with statistical reliability, they noted that in “all estimates suggest that the death toll from the pandemic is far greater than the official tally “.

Christophe Guilmoto, a demographer at the Development Research Institute, recently estimated in another study that the death toll was around 2.2 million at the end of May.

Guilmoto observed that the death rate (per million population) in India was 50% lower than the world average. “Such a low figure is in obvious contradiction with the severity of the crisis which affected the majority of Indian families in the country, which resulted in the dramatic shortage of vaccines, covid-19 tests, ambulances, access to medical personnel, to hospital beds, with oxygen, medicines and, finally, coffins, wood, priests, places of cremation or burial, as has been widely reported in the Indian and international media ”, warned the expert.

The Indian Ministry of Health, for its part, continues to support the officially announced figures and a month ago criticized The Economist magazine, which it accused of having published a “speculative” and “misinformed” note in which he assured that the excess mortality was between five and seven times higher than the figures provided by the ministry.

The underreporting of deaths, however, would not be a problem unique to India. In May of this year, the World Health Organization assured that up to three times as many people have died worldwide during the pandemic (from the coronavirus or other causes) than what is indicated in official statistics .