There is a wide range of variations between the recorded and actualdeaths occurred due to COVID-19 pandemic.
What is the ground reality?
The second wave of deadly pandemic in India is taking the true death toll in excess when compared to the reported Covid-19 fatality numbers which are released on daily basis.
In Gujarat, between March 1 and May 10, around 1,23,000 death certificates were issued as compared to only 58,000 in the same period in 2020.
This excess deaths numbers of 65,000, when compared to an official Covid-19 death scorecard, reveals the fact of potential under-reporting factor of 16.
But the Gujarat government has not disputed the 2021 numbers but correctly pointed out that 2020 was a problematic reference year.
This is because national lockdown has halted the death certification process and that deaths increase every year by a certain amount any way.
The under-reporting factor in Gujarat also varies substantially across municipal corporations, where death registration statistics are near-complete.
These figures are seem to be larger for smaller settlement sizes like Ahmedabad (4), Vadodara (16) and Rajkot (30).
When we compare per capita Covid-19 deaths of Ahmedabad and Rajkot, it seems that municipalities were similarly affected, but Rajkot was ten times more affected than Ahmedabad.
What can we infer from this?
When we analyse with excess deaths rather than the reported Covid-19 death figures in Gujarat, we can observe that there is little relation with reported Covid-19 caseloads.
For example, Jamnagar has a higher reported Covid-19 caseload and death toll per capita than other municipal corporations of its size yet its under-reporting factor is nearly a fourth of the others.
This means that the actual figures on Covid-19 may be useful to gauge some trends in the pandemic but they will be able to capture the scale of the tragedy.
As Covid-19 sweeps through rural India, especially in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand death registration statistics are incomplete.
The death toll in these states likely to be higher than what is reported as Covid-19 death and can take the all-India death toll of the second wave to over a million.
What should be done now?
India’s death registration system started in the 1860s in response to the cholera pandemic.
In response to the current pandemic, we need to have a real-time release of death registration statistics.
This current invisibility on the reported Covid-19 dashboards needs immediate attention and resources for saving the lives.
Understanding the true scale of the tragedy today will also enable better district-level planning to counter future pandemic waves.
