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Two Indian states have started to revise their official death toll from COVID, after central Indian authorities and the state’s highest courts intervened in recent weeks, following close national and international scrutiny of the number of deaths from COVID in India.
The total death toll currently stands at over 391,000, making it the third highest in the world. But critics believe the actual number of COVID victims in the country is much higher.
States change their death toll
The state of Maharashtra, home to India’s largest metropolis of Mumbai, launched an investigation in mid-May, claiming more than 10,000 deaths from COVID as of June 11.
The eastern state of Bihar, which made headlines after corpses washed up on the banks of the Ganges, claimed nearly 4,000 lives in a single day on June 9.
As the northern states of Rajasthan and Uttarakhand have just started audits, Uttar Pradesh, which has also come under repeated gunfire for covering up deaths from COVID, has yet to launch an investigation. official investigation.
‘No question of hiding statistics’, says official
Rajesh Tope, Maharashtra’s health minister, tweeted that the state government was working transparently and that there was “no question of hiding the statistics”. He added that information on deaths from COVID was pending only due to “technical difficulties”.
Pratyaya Amrit, a senior health secretary in the state of Bihar, said the increase was due to deaths of people who have died in private hospitals, home isolation or post-COVID complications.
Following the revised figures, India’s central health ministry asked each of the governments to “properly” conduct the recount audit.
The central authority has defended India against an article published in the English-language news magazine The Economist indicating that the true COVID death toll in India could be five to seven times higher than “speculative.”
Poor data collection is a problem, experts say
Epidemiologists widely agree that poor data quality was a major obstacle to tracking deaths during the second wave of COVID in India.
Dr Swapneil Parikh, author of The Coronavirus: What you Need to Know about the Global Pandemic, told DW that one of the reasons for the low mortality data was that the systems were not robust enough to aggregate the data into real time.
He added that the COVID numbers could be masked in the short term, but that it was incredibly difficult to do so in the long term.
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The underestimation of deaths is a “complex” problem
Murad Banaji, a mathematician who closely followed the second wave of COVID, told DW that undercoverage of deaths was a complex problem.
According to Banaji, some Indian states have been shown to be better than others at recording the deaths of people, even before the pandemic.
For example, Bihar, a large rural state, had a poor record of registering deaths even before the pandemic. It only recorded 35% of deaths in the state in 2018. In addition, data from the vital statistics system that records births and deaths is not publicly available.
Conversely, the central state of Madhya Pradesh recorded 79% of deaths in 2018. Mortality data is also widely available online, Banaji told DW.
This mortality data was used to understand the number of “excessive deaths” caused by COVID during the pandemic period. But different registration practices before the pandemic mean that the actual number of excess deaths cannot be calculated accurately in some states.
Another complicating factor for India’s COVID-19 death toll data is that many of the “excessive deaths” have yet to be officially certified.
Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, who has written extensively on the pandemic, told DW that only 25% of recorded deaths were medically certified to determine the cause of death even before the pandemic.
The count continues
Despite the hardships, Indian citizens are determined to overcome the confusion and explain every COVID death in the country.
Kavita Krishnan, a leading activist and secretary of the Progressive Women’s Association of India, recently launched a “Count Every Death” campaign with several other organizations. Volunteers have already started to independently document the deaths with the aim of reaching an actual figure.
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