When a COVID-19 wave hit India over the winter and spring of 2021, hospitals were filled beyond capacity, oxygen was nearly impossible to obtain, and community networks for tending to the dead were overwhelmed.
Government reporting at the time put the death toll at under a million.
In a new study, researchers found that number at 3.2 million people, according to a paper co-authored by and an international team of researchers.
Their analyses found that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021 were six to seven times higher than reported officially.
In the study, the team reviewed data on all causes of death from an independent survey of 140,000 adults, and from two government data sources including deaths reported in health facilities and registered deaths in 10 states in India.
They compared these counts to the patterns found in previous years without COVID and found that total deaths increased by 26% to 29% in the COVID period compared to total deaths in past years.
This range was consistent across separate data sources.
The work uses many new kinds of data, including measures of well-being generated from satellite images, data collected by government programs, and archival administrative records not previously used for policy design.
The research lab has created an open-source data platform to support socioeconomic research in India and the developing world.
The global pandemic presented many critical questions about how governments and organizations can respond that the team believes this work can help answer.
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The study is published in Science and was conducted by Associate Professor of Economics Paul Novosad et al.
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