Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Why India's real Covid toll may never be known
To improve health, it is important to get information about death and disease. For example, an increase in lung cancer death rates among men in the 1930s led to the identification of smoking as a major cause. Also, a surge in deaths among young gay men revealed HIV/Aids as the cause. However, causes of death aren’t always available or reliable in many countries including India whose population exceeds 1.4 billion. In India, approximately, half of the 10 million deaths each year occur at home, especially in villages where record-keeping of the cause of death is not well reported or even identified. So, it is uncertain how many people died of Covid in India as the government has been reluctant to identify or reveal the numbers because of lack of such data or their pride. In fact, India reported 481,000 Covid deaths in 2020 and 2021 combined, but the World Health Organization estimates the figure would have been 10 times higher than that, which accounts for nearly a third of the world’s Covid deaths during the period. How did WHO estimate the figure? Excess deaths, a simple measure of how many more people died compared with previous years.
Read the article and learn about how difficult it is to identify the number and the cause of death in India and the world.
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