A latest research based on independent nationally representative surveys and models revealed that India's Covid-19 fatalities, may have topped 32 lakh – about 7 times more than the official death toll of 4,83,463 declared by the Government as on January 8, 2022.
A research paper by IIM-A professor Chinmay Tumbe and his co-author Paul Novosad, Economics Professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover, US, showed that Covid-19 constituted 29 per cent of the overall deaths that occurred between June 2020-July 2021; that works out to a figure of 32 lakh deaths, of which 27 lakh had occurred during the second wave (April-July 2021).
The researchers used an independent nationally representative survey of 140,000 adults and compared Covid mortality during 2020 and 2021 Covid-19 waves with the expected all-cause mortality. When compared with pre-pandemic periods, all-cause mortality was 27 per cent higher in 0.2 million health facilities and 26% higher in civil registration deaths in 10 States. Both the increases occurred mostly in 2021.
“The analyses find that India’s cumulative Covid deaths by September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially,” the researchers noted in the paper, published in the Science magazine on January 6, 2022.