Mint Explainer | New covid death estimate: Does Indian govt's rebuttal add up?
Science Advances journal on 19 July, says that life expectancy at birth was 2.6 years lower and mortality 17% higher in 2020 compared to 2019. This is for a subsample of 14 states and Union territories, but the authors said that if other states followed the same trends, it would add up to 1.19 million excess deaths across India in 2020. The study found that life expectancy declined more for women than for men, and also more for children and for marginalized groups.
Mortality was particularly high in the last four months of 2020. Mint explains how to read the numbers, and understand the nuances of official estimation of fatalities in a country where many deaths go unregistered. Governments will naturally fail to capture the true toll of a pandemic like covid-19: Not all patients are tested, and defining a “covid death" is complicated.
This left the “excess deaths" approach the best-placed method to estimate the toll. "Excess deaths" approach t is the difference between the number of deaths in an unusual period (such as 2020 and 2021) and the number of deaths in a normal year. This can give a sense of the direct and indirect toll of a pandemic like covid-19.
The latest estimate is eight times India’s official death count attributed to covid-19 in 2020, and 1.5 times the World Health Organization’s excess deaths estimate. It relies on the last National Family Health Survey (NFHS), fieldwork for which was conducted between June 2019 and April 2021. The survey asks questions that can be used to assess life expectancy and history of recent deaths in a family.
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