According to the most comprehensive research on the effect of virus in South Asian Country India’s excess deaths during the pandemic could be a staggering 10 times the official COVID-19 toll, likely making it modern India’s worst human tragedy.
Most experts believe India’s official toll of more than 414,000 dead is a vast undercount, but the government has dismissed those concerns as exaggerated and misleading.
The report released on Tuesday estimated excess gap between those recorded and those that would have been expected to be between 3 million to 4.7 million between January 2020 and June 2021.
It said an accurate figure may “prove elusive” but the true death toll “is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count.”
The report, published by Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s former chief economic adviser, and two other researchers at the Center for Global Development and Harvard University, said the count could have missed deaths occurring in over whelmed hospitals or while health care was delayed or disrupted, especially during the devastating peak surge earlier this year.
“True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since Partition and independence,” the report said.
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