More evidence emerges of India’s true death toll from covid-19

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New surveys corroborate earlier analysis that the government’s numbers represent a disturbingly small fraction of the real figure

Yet as Indians emerge from lockdowns, it is not easy to shake off the gloom. True, the official death toll has fallen steadily for the past month, to half its peak of over 4,000 a day in mid-May. But evidence continues to accumulate that the government’s numbers represent a disturbingly small fraction of the real figure. This discrepancy does not just mean that the true level of India’s suffering has been glossed over.

Such estimates have been extrapolated from patchy and often unreliable local-government data, from company records—including of deaths among staff—and from analysis of such things as obituaries. Evidence from another source, opinion surveys, corroborates the higher numbers. One, conducted in May by Prashnam, a new polling group, asked 15,000 people, across mostly rural areas in Hindi-speaking states in the north, whether anyone in their family or neighbourhood had died of covid-19.

Rajesh Jain, Prashnam’s founder, then compared this result with surveys in America that had asked a similar question, including one conducted in March by the University of Chicago, which found that 19% of respondents had a close friend or relative who had died in the pandemic. Given the closeness of those results, Mr Jain says that India’s overall covid-19 mortality rate is likely to be closer to America’s, at 1,800 deaths per million people, than to its official figure of 230 per million.

An older polling group, CVoter, has since June last year been collecting daily data on covid-19 from a wider pool of respondents in ten languages across India. Its team consistently posed a slightly different question from Prashnam’s, asking if any immediate family members had died from the virus. Following India’s first wave, in September, the number who answered yes predictably rose, and then lingered at around 1%. But in April and May it shot up, peaking at 7.4%.

Why does India’s government, as well as its press, cling so firmly to misleading official numbers? Mr Deshmukh, who says he is very confident of his own figures, partly blames journalists for what he describes as poor numeracy. But he is dismissive of the excuse that India’s many layers of government lack the capacity to generate solid statistics. “This is not about capacity, but intent,” he says. “And it’s not about the central government or a particular party.

 

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is there a health issue in doubling the vax dose between the first and second...Experts never backed doubling vax dose gap-

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Did you undertake any attempt to bring out the real culprit in the spread of the global pandemic ? Did you publish everything of the corroborating evidences on that ? Modi's vaccination support helped a developing country as India ,one of the earliest to develop vaccines.

Even your thumbnail photo has been debunked. Also, surveys are just people siting in room and agreeing on what they FEEL. Nothing scientific about it. vulturejournalism

horrible

Please also investigate the true toll of Mexico COVID deaths

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