New Delhi, India – The real death toll in India in the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic that devastated the world’s most populous country could be eight times higher than official government figures, a study reveals. new examine.
While this first wave of the virus took the world by surprise, forcing governments and fitness 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’s figures, based on the Indian government’s 2019-21 National Family Health Survey (NFHS), a comprehensive report on the country’s physical prestige and family well-being, are also 1. 5 times higher than estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO). for India. COVID-19 death toll in 2020.
The total number of deaths from the virus in India by the end of 2021 stands at 481,000.
But the new studies also show deep inequalities among those suffering from the pandemic, based on 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 suffered the worst: 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 over the 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 was more inflamed than others,” Gupta told Al Jazeera. “However, when Muslims contracted COVID, the effects show that they were, in fact, shunned, confronted with stereotypes, and had no access to health 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 diseases affect mortality rates. “
“The consequences are more pronounced in the marginalized upper layers. . . everything adds up,” he said.
The study found that women also suffered more than men. While the life expectancy of Indian men decreased by 2. 1 years in 2020, for women it decreased by another year. This contrasts with the global trend: overall, everywhere, male life expectancy declined the most during the pandemic.
“Several aspects, coupled with long-standing gender discrimination and 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 that this may simply be due to disruptions in public fitness services, in addition to vaccinations during childhood, 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 government led by Narendra Modi has rejected the WHO figures, arguing that the style used in the UN framework for the calculations would not possibly apply to India.
But it is not only about global organizations. Independent public fitness experts and researchers have continuously accused the Indian government of underestimating the death toll amid the pandemic. “The government’s efforts have fallen far short of what was mandatory to address inequalities in access to physical care,” Sundararaman told Al Jazeera. “The government will have to make the knowledge public for review. There’s nothing to be gained by not participating in those studies,” he added, referring to the findings of the latest research.
When the pandemic hit, Gupta said researchers like him had the idea that “the government would see the importance of having smart mortality data. ” Instead, he said, “items that in the past were no longer made public. “
The new study only extrapolates the 2020 figures due to the lack of quality data to read the corresponding figures from 2021, when the Delta variant arrived. “There are simply gaps in the data we analyze,” Gupta added. “Estimates for 2021 are expected to be even higher than 2020. “
Prabhat Jha, director of the Toronto Global Health Research Centre, one of the experts who supported the WHO’s excess mortality calculation, said: “Based on our knowledge and long-term work, the Delta wave is much deadlier 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. I expected it.
Jha cited disruptions in knowledge gathering for the NFHS survey during the pandemic as something that could have affected the quality of 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 thing: 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 close this entire debate by releasing knowledge that directly evidences excess mortality,” Jha said.