From the article:
Officially India has recorded just 414,000 Covid-19 deaths since the virus was first detected in the country in early 2020. The Indian government counts only patients who die in hospital with a positive test as Covid-19 deaths, excluding large numbers of victims who could not obtain tests or hospital care, or who died from coronavirus-related complications after being discharged.
A second study, also published on Tuesday, estimated that India had suffered between 3.4m and 4.7m excess deaths during the pandemic, about 10 times the official death toll.
The study, whose three authors included Arvind Subramanian, the government’s former chief economic adviser, examined three sources of data: all-cause mortality statistics from seven large states; seroprevalence studies; and household surveys carried out by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.
While each of the three sources yielded different estimates, the paper’s authors said “they all point to significantly greater deaths than the official estimates” and indicated that India’s “first wave was more lethal than is widely believed”. “What is tragically clear is that too many people, in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands, may have died,” the authors said.
