The underreporting of cases and deaths by Covid-19 in India is a topic that has already been commented on, but a study published this Thursday (6) by the journal Science, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, projects the phenomenon in numbers.
According to the researchers’ conclusions, the number of Indian victims of the coronavirus may have exceeded the 3 million mark, while the official figure accounts for 483,000.
The Science article brings data from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) that point to a massive deficit in the registration of deaths in the Asian country. Of a total of 10 million deaths estimated by the UNDP in 2020, more than 3 million were not registered and 8 million do not have a medical certificate.
As official statistics lack sources or even reliability, researchers have developed mathematical models that, if not exactly exposing India’s epidemiological scenario, at least come closer to reality.
The study builds on evidence that increases in the overall death rate amid a spike in coronavirus transmission — like the one India saw last year, with hospitals, crematoria and cemeteries overcrowded — can be attributed almost entirely to Covid pandemic.
For the World Health Organization (WHO), as the Science article points out, this is a crude method of counting, but useful in situations where there are no reliable databases on the pandemic.
The methodology to come to the conclusion that the actual number of Covid-19 deaths in India could be up to seven times the officially reported, the study authors cross-referenced data from an independent and two government sources.
The first is a daily telephone survey from March 2020 to July 2021. Over this period, more than 137,000 respondents were surveyed across all states and territories of India. Interviewers asked about people with symptoms of Covid and eventual deaths caused by the disease.
According to the researchers, during most weeks in the period analyzed, the number of families reporting deaths from Covid did not reach 0.7% of the total. But in the months where there were peaks of transmission of the disease in India, the rate soared: it reached 1.2% between September and October 2020, and 6% in June 2021.
“Applying these proportions to the overall expected death rate from June 1, 2020 to July 1, 2021 resulted in an estimated 3.2 million (from 3.1 million to 3.4 million) Covid deaths, or 29% of all-cause deaths expected during the 13-month period,” the authors explain.
Of the total number of deaths, according to the survey, most (about 85%) occurred between April and July last year. In this period, daily cases of coronavirus jumped from 100,000 to 400,000, health systems collapsed, a new variant was discovered in India and the country became the third with the most deaths from Covid, behind the United States and Brazil. .
Despite pointing out the underreporting based on the scientific method, the study makes the reservation that the conclusion reached by the researchers is still conservative. “Deaths from Covid are usually acute, occurring within weeks of infection, but the full effects of coronavirus infection on various underlying diseases are unknown,” the authors explain.
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