Washington: The World Health Organization’s ambitious effort to assess the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic discovered that many more people perished than previously thought – roughly 15 million by the end of 2021, more than double the official tally of six million reported by individual governments.
However, the staggering estimate — the result of more than a year of research and analysis by experts from around the world and the most comprehensive look at the pandemic’s lethality to date — has been delayed for months due to objections from India, which disputes the calculation of how many of its citizens died and has attempted to keep it from becoming public.
More than a third of the additional nine million deaths are thought to have happened in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has stuck to its own estimate of 520,000 deaths. According to persons familiar with the figures who were not permitted to speak publicly, the W.H.O. will reveal that India’s death toll is at least four million, making it the world’s largest. The New York Times was unable to find out what the estimations were for other countries.
The World Health Organization’s computation incorporated national data on reported deaths with fresh data from localities and household surveys, as well as statistical models to account for deaths that were overlooked. The majority of the discrepancy in the new global estimate is due to previously uncounted deaths, the majority of which were caused directly by Covid; the new number also includes indirect deaths, such as those caused by individuals being unable to get care for other illnesses due to the pandemic.
Science in India has been increasingly politicized over the course of the pandemic. In February, India’s junior health minister criticized a study published in the journal Science that estimated the country’s Covid death toll to be seven to eight times the official number. In March, the government questioned the methodology of a study published in The Lancet that estimated India’s deaths at four million.
India has although not submitted its total mortality data to the W.H.O. for the past two years, but the organisation researchers have used numbers gathered from at least 12 states, including Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka, which experts say show at least five to six times as many deaths as a result of Covid-19.
Besides India, there are other large countries where the data is also uncertain.
It’s evident that the Modi government is concerned about pandemic statistics. “It’s an unusual approach,” said Anand Krishnan, a community medicine professor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, who has also been reviewing the data with the World Health Organization. “I can’t recall a moment when it has done so before.”
As an independent media platform, we do not take advertisements from governments and corporate houses. It is you, our readers, who have supported us on our journey to do honest and unbiased journalism. Please contribute, so that we can continue to do the same in future.
