New Delhi, India – The real death toll in India in the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic that has devastated the world’s most populous country may be eight times higher than official government figures, a new study reveals.
While this first wave of the virus took the world by surprise, forcing governments and health systems to scramble to respond, India, after implementing a strict lockdown, turns out to have escaped the worst of its effects. The country devastated by the delta variant in 2021, when hospitals ran out of beds and oxygen, other people died gasping in the open air in gyms and rows of smoldering pyres flooded cremation sites across the country.
But new studies suggest that the first wave, while not as fatal as 2021, caused greater damage than has been recognized.
The study, co-authored by 10 demographers and economists from elite foreign institutes, found that India recorded 1. 19 million more deaths in 2020, the first wave of the pandemic, compared to 2019.
This is 8 times India’s official COVID-19 figure for 2020 of 148,738 deaths. The study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
The study figures, based on the Government of India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2019-21, a comprehensive report on the country’s physical prestige and family well-being, are also 1. 5 times higher than the World Health Organization (WHO). estimate for India. Death toll from COVID-19 in 2020.
The total number of deaths from the virus in India at the end of 2021 stands at 481,000.
But the new studies also show deep inequalities among victims of the pandemic, in terms of gender, caste and religion.
Studies found that in 2020, the life expectancy of an upper-caste Indian of the Hindu religion decreased by 1. 3 years. In contrast, the average life expectancy of other “listed caste” people (communities that have faced the worst caste formula discrimination for centuries) dropped to 2. 7 years.
Indian Muslims have suffered the most: their life expectancy fell by 5. 4 years in 2020.
These communities had a lower life expectancy at birth than high-caste Hindus, even before the pandemic, the study notes. “The pandemic has exacerbated those disparities,” he adds. These declines are comparable to or greater in absolute magnitude than those experienced by Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics in the United States in 2020. “
“Muslims have faced marginalization for a long time, and this has intensified in recent years,” said Aashish Gupta, one of the study’s authors and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford.
“We have no knowledge to recommend that any organization or network has become more inflamed than others,” Gupta told Al Jazeera. “However, when Muslims contracted COVID, the effects show that they were rejected, faced with stereotypes, and did not have access to physical care. Marginalized communities have been left to fend for themselves.
T Sundararaman, a public fitness expert who served as executive director of the National Health Systems Resource Centre, the arm of India’s fitness ministry, said the trend is “consistent with what we know about how “disease affects mortality rates. “
“The consequences are more pronounced in the highest marginalized strata… it all adds up,” he stated.
The study found that women also suffered more than men. While the life expectancy of Indian men decreased by 2. 1 years in 2020, it decreased by another year for women. This contrasts with the global trend: overall, around the world, men’s life expectancy has increased. The pandemic diminished further.
“Several aspects, coupled with gender discrimination and long-standing inequality in resource allocation in a largely patriarchal society, contribute to the declining life expectancy of women,” Gupta said. “We knew that women were especially vulnerable in Indian society, but the difference surprised us. “
Younger and older Indians have seen the biggest increases in death rates, but researchers warn this may simply be due to disruptions in public fitness services, coupled with formative years vaccinations, tuberculosis treatment and other indirect effects of COVID-19.
While 481,000 Indians have died from the pandemic, according to the government, the WHO estimates the death toll to be between 3. 3 million and 6. 5 million Indians, the highest of any country.
The Narendra Modi-led government has rejected the WHO figures, arguing that the style used in the UN framework for calculations would not possibly apply to India.
But it is not just about global organizations. Independent public fitness experts and researchers have continually accused the Indian government of underestimating the death toll amid the pandemic. “The government’s efforts have been much shorter than necessary to address inequalities in access to physical care. ” “The government wants to make the knowledge public for review. There is nothing to be gained by not participating in those studies,” she added, referring to the latest research findings.
When the pandemic hit, Gupta said researchers like him believed “the government would perceive the importance of having smart mortality data. “On the other hand, he said, “the material that was previously available is no longer made public. “
The new study only extrapolates the 2020 figures due to the lack of quality data to read the corresponding figures for 2021, when the Delta variant arrived. “There are simply gaps in the data we analyzed,” Gupta added. “The estimates for 2021 are expected to be even higher than in 2020. “
Prabhat Jha, director of the Toronto Global Health Research Centre, one of the experts who supported the WHO’s estimate of excess mortality, said: “Based on our knowledge and our long-term work, the Delta wave is much more deadly than 2020. ”
“Our estimate for the entire era [of the pandemic] is between 3. 5 and four million additional deaths, of which only about 3 million were due to the Delta wave,” Jha said, adding that he found that the estimates from the new study for 2020 were “much higher. ” “than he thought. he had planned.
Jha cited disruptions in knowledge collection for the NFHS survey during the pandemic as something that could have affected the quality of the knowledge used for the new research.
But Gupta argued that the authors conducted “several data checks on the paper that suggest that the quality of the data has been compromised due to the pandemic. “The study’s authors also state that the trend is “representative of a quarter of the population. “
All experts agree on one point: Greater transparency in data collected through the government could allow India to say once and for all how many more people it has lost to the pandemic.
“The Indian government can shut down this total debate by releasing knowledge that directly evidences excess mortality,” Jha said.