Article on medicalxpress.com
Analyses suggests pandemic fatalities in India were much higher than estimated.
When a COVID-19 wave hit India over the winter and spring of 2021, hospitals were filled beyond capacity, oxygen was nearly impossible to obtain, and community networks for tending to the dead were overwhelmed. Government reporting at the time put the death toll at under a million.
A more accurate measure of COVID-19 deaths in India puts that number at 3.2 million people, according to a paper co-authored by Associate Professor of Economics Paul Novosad and an international team of researchers.
The team reviewed data on all causes of death from an independent survey of 140,000 adults, and from two government data sources including deaths reported in health facilities and registered deaths in 10 states in India. They compared these counts to the patterns found in previous years without COVID and found that total deaths increased by 26% to 29% in the COVID period compared to total deaths in past years. This range was consistent across separate data sources, the researchers wrote.