India: Covid-19 death toll could be 10 times higher than official toll
A resident of Jammu, India, who lost a relative to death from Covid-19, reacts by arriving in front of a crematorium on April 25, 2021. AP - Channi Anand
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
A study by the
Center for Global Development
reveals that the death toll in India linked to Covid-19 may have been vastly underestimated.
Based on excess mortality, the researchers show that this number could be ten times higher and reach 4 million deaths directly or indirectly linked to the disease.
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While the country has, this Tuesday, July 20, 414,482 dead and more than 30 million infections due to Covid-19,
a study by the Center for Global Development,
a non-profit think tank based in Washington DC and London , estimates that the death toll could be much higher.
This report, carried out over a period from the start of the pandemic to June, estimates that between 3.4 and 4.9 million deaths are attributable to the coronavirus.
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India's worst human tragedy since independence
"
Many experts had already warned of flaws in the local health system that could lead to this kind of gap between the number of deaths recorded and the actual number of deaths. Moreover, the experts do not put the undervaluation of the official Indian record on the account of a deliberate desire to cover up. In recent weeks, several Indian states have even revised their balance sheets upwards.
This study aims above all to sound the alarm bells in relation to the tragedy which is playing out in the Indian subcontinent: "
The real deaths are likely to amount in the millions and not in the hundreds of thousands, which undoubtedly makes it the India's worst human tragedy since independence.
[...] As a country, India must [...] learn from it and engrave the memory of it in the collective conscience of the nation.
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India was submerged by a very important wave of contagion during the spring of 2021. Hundreds of thousands of cases were recorded per day in India in the worst days of the second wave.
It is notably due to the appearance in the country of the Delta variant, which is much more contagious than the original strain of the virus and more contagious than the Alpha variant.
A first wave also very deadly
Yet the study shows that a large number of deaths during the first wave would not have been taken into account either.
According to their estimates, the death toll during the first wave could be between 1.5 and 3.4 million dead.
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The first wave seems to have been deadlier than we think
," say the experts.
Because it was spread out in time and space, unlike the sudden, focused second wave.
The mortality of the first wave appeared to be moderate.
"
In May, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that the excess mortality caused by the pandemic worldwide was two to three times higher than the deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
►Also read: India: why the death toll from Covid-19 is largely underestimated
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