By SHEIKH SAALIQ and KRUTIKA PATHI , AP
FILE – In this Sept. 14, 2020, file photo, Ramananda Sarkar, 43, who has cremated more than 450 COVID-19 victims stands by burning funeral pyres of COVID-19 victims in Gauhati, India. India’s excess deaths during the pandemic could be a staggering 10 times the official COVID-19 toll, likely making it modern India’s worst human tragedy, according to the most comprehensive research yet on the ravages of the virus in the south Asian country. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath, File)
NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s excess deaths during the pandemic could be a staggering 10 times the official COVID-19 toll, likely making it modern India’s worst human tragedy, according to the most comprehensive research yet on the ravages of the virus in the south Asian country.
Most experts believe India’s official toll of more than 414,000 dead is a vast undercount, but the government has dismissed those concerns as exaggerated and misleading.
The report released Tuesday estimated excess deaths — the gap between those recorded and those that would have been expected — to be between 3 million to 4.7 million between January 2020 and June 2021. It said an accurate figure may “prove elusive” but the true death toll “is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count.”
The report, published by Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s former chief economic adviser, and two other researchers at the Center for Global Development and Harvard University, said the count could have missed deaths occurring in overwhelmed hospitals or while health care was delayed or disrupted, especially during the devastating peak surge earlier this year.
“True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since Partition and independence,” the report said.
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The Partition of the British-ruled Indian subcontinent into independent India and Pakistan in 1947 led to the killing of up to 1 million people as gangs of Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other.
The report on India’s virus toll used three calculation methods: data from the civil registration system that records births and deaths across seven states, blood tests showing the prevalence of the virus in India alongside global COVID-19 fatality rates, and an economic survey of nearly 900,000 people done thrice a year.
Researchers cautioned that each method had weaknesses, such as the economic survey omitting the causes of death.
Instead, researchers looked at deaths from all causes and compared that data to mortality in previous years — a method widely considered an accurate metric.
Researchers also cautioned that virus prevalence and COVID-19 deaths in the seven states they studied may not translate to all of India, since the virus could have spread worse in urban versus rural states and since health care quality varies greatly around India.
And while other nations are believed to have undercounted deaths in the pandemic, India is believed to have a greater gap due to it having the world’s second highest population of 1.4 billion and its situation is complicated because not all deaths were recorded even before the pandemic.
Dr. Jacob John, who studies viruses at the Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India, reviewed the report for The Associated Press and said it underscores the devastating impact COVID-19 had on the country’s under-prepared health system.
“This analysis reiterates the observations of other fearless investigative journalists that have highlighted the massive undercounting of deaths,” Jacob said.
The report also estimated that nearly 2 million Indians died during the first surge in infections last year and said not “grasping the scale of the tragedy in real time” may have “bred collective complacency that led to the horrors” of the surge earlier this year.
Over the last few months, some Indian states have increased their COVID-19 death toll after finding thousands of previously unreported cases, raising concerns that many more fatalities were not officially recorded.
Several Indian journalists have also published higher numbers from some states using government data. Scientists say this new information is helping them better understand how COVID-19 spread in India.
Murad Banaji, who studies mathematics at Middlesex University and has been looking at India’s COVID-19 mortality figures, said the recent data has confirmed some of the suspicions about undercounting. Banaji said the new data also shows the virus wasn’t restricted to urban centers, as contemporary reports had indicated, but that India’s villages were also badly impacted.
“A question we should ask is if some of those deaths were avoidable,” he said.
It is telling that the AP is carrying this story which describes inaccuracies of Indian deaths related to the SARS-Cov2 virus within hours of a US healthcare researcher becoming a whistleblower announcing, under penalty of perjury, that the US death toll from the vaccines is purposefully being misreported by a factor of 5 – and yet, the AP has no mention of the US whistleblower report.
Now, I don’t know anything about the US whistleblower other than she has testified under oath, fighting upstream against political objectives by the US Govt and Media alike, which have each been seen to use manipulation and unconventional tactics to silence voices such as her own – hence, it is a fairly substantial act for anyone to approach with a sense of nonchalance.
Meanwhile, we hear a complete silence about this Whistleblower report, not even anyone refuting her claims from the US Govt and Media, but the headline on the AP is that India is under-reporting their deaths. Well, perhaps, India is under-reporting their deaths. India’s healthcare is well acknowledged as being disadvantaged to the needs of her population.
Still, the truth is always the first casualty in any war, and the Covid war has seen to give way to the Vaccine war of late, and India stands in opposition, to some extent at least, in opposition to the objectives of the AP and her sister Media groups of total world vaccination and the silencing of any dissent. And yet, should we assume the validity of this reporting on India, and I would agree with Adam that there is a healthy cause to suspect the motivation of this report, the validity is beyond the interest of the AP or the Media at large.
As in WWII, the media has chosen a side to champion in this current endeavor to achieve World Wide exposure to the spike protein for whatever purpose, and India is pursuing vaccines and treatments alike, which is quite contrary to the objectives of the AP and her cohorts – choice of participation should never be an accepted option in an authoritarian project. Hence, if there is any validity to this report, a rational understanding of India’s abilities might be a better source for this conclusion than being due to the propaganda forced upon the world by International Run Fake News Groups.
None of the “researchers,” as far as we can tell from this account, were physicians. All seem to have been economists or mathematicians, whose understanding of medical matters is not necessarily more than the average layman. All are employed at institutions that are longtime advocates of the official Covid narrative.
Although this AP dispatch claims that the researchers have found evidence of excess total deaths from all causes during the pandemic, it never provides any figure for excess deaths during the pandemic from earlier periods.