India’s Covid deaths could be as high as 3.7 million, French scientist claims

India’s actual Covid-19 fatalities are likely to be seven times higher than the official estimate of 510,000 deaths, a French expert said. The government rejected the study, asserting it followed globally acceptable practice for a proper body count.

Health workers in rural India have also been affected by Covid © RFI Murali Krishnan

Population scientist Christophe Guilmoto pegged India's Covid-19 mortality at between 3.2 million and 3.7 million by November last year when India’s official virus toll was 459,000.

Using a new model, researchers estimate that 3.2 million to 3.7 million people have died of Covid-19 in India, a nation of 1.4 billion people. https://t.co/5YV8IkPu1f

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) February 16, 2022

If his calculations are accurate then India would have the world’s highest number of virus casualties and 27 times more than the French coronavirus toll of 139,489.

Quality samples

The government in Delhi blasted Guilmoto’s study for basing it on limited surveys.

But the expert insisted the analysed sample numbers provided good quality data for India, which has posted 42.9 million coronavirus infections since March 2020.

“When we don’t have the same quality data for the whole population, we have to extrapolate from a sample,” Guilmoto told RFI.

The scientist said he sampled four sets of populations and using a mathematical process reached his conclusions.

“Sometimes, samples come from surveys but there have been no surveys devoted to Covid mortality in India where we had only Sero-surveys so what you want to do in that case, you use sub-samples,” he said.

India’s reaction

The Indian government in a statement dismissed Guilmoto’s argument as fallacious.

There have been some media reports based on a published research paper alleging that mortality due to #COVID19 in India is much higher than the official count and actual numbers have been undercounted...These reports are fallacious and completely inaccurate: Govt of India pic.twitter.com/cA9ZR0N4sg

— ANI (@ANI) February 17, 2022

“This exercise runs the risk of mapping skewed data of outliers together and is bound to give wrong estimations, thereby leading to fallacious conclusions,” the statement added.

“Based on globally-acceptable categorization, government ... has a comprehensive definition to classify Covid deaths which has been shared with states and the states are following it,” it added.

Even with the new figure, India would still rank 19th in the world when calculating fatalities in proportion to population, analysts say.

Guilmoto, a demographer at the Marseille-based Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, joined India’s Centre de Sciences humaines research group in Delhi during India’s devastating Delta surge last spring.

Second claim

Rajib Dasgupta from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University advised researchers to crunch data with extreme care.

“It is a general caveat that estimations and models are prone to errors and all good modellers specify their assumptions,” he said but added a court ruling on state dole-outs for relatives of Covid victims revealed the magnitude of the pandemic.

“The actual claims disbursed for Gujarat (state) turned out to be at least eight times the official toll and more than two and a half to three times for Andhra Pradesh and Kerala,” Dasgupta, a community health expert, told RFI. 

Guilmoto’s report came a month after researchers led by Toronto-based epidemiologist Prabhat Jha put India’s Covid toll at 3.2 million but that estimate too was rejected by the government as fallacious, ill-informed and mischievous.

The French demographer endorsed India’s data collection system and said his effort was only to help find the missing pieces.

“It is not new for me as when we provide new estimates to governments or local authorities, they are a little bit uneasy because they have been collecting data which are showing something different.

“We are only trying to encourage the statistical system to be strengthened in India,” Guilmoto added.

An Omicron-driven winter surge was largely uneventful and attributed to India’s high-paced vaccination drive which hit the mark of one billion doses in November 2021.

As India continues its relentless fight against #COVID19, the country administers more than 175 crore COVID vaccines so far!

Let's continue to follow PM's strategy of:
👉Test
👉Track
👉Treat
👉Teeka

For more updates, visit: https://t.co/CKhgW33Jll #IndiaFightsCorona pic.twitter.com/U58EdXA5Lz

— MyGovIndia (@mygovindia) February 19, 2022

Some 780 million Indians have taken both doses and the ailing elderly are offered a booster shot from a growing tray of antidotes now in India.