Coronavirus: How many Covid-19 deaths is India missing?
India has registered more than 50,000 Covid-19 deaths, overtaking the UK to become the fourth-worst-affected country for fatalities.
But the number of deaths per million people stands at 34 - far lower than what has been reported in Europe or North America.
The case fatality rate or CFR, which measures deaths among Covid-19 patients, is just around 2%. Even in badly-hit state like Maharashtra the number of deaths is doubling only in about 40 days. "The death rates have kept low all along, even as cases rose," K Srinath Reddy, president of the think tank, Public Health Foundation of India, told me.
Many epidemiologists attribute this relatively low fatality rate to a young population - the elderly are typically more vulnerable to the infection. It is not clear whether other factors like immunity deriving from previous infections from other coronaviruses, are also responsible. Also, they point to a pattern of low mortality in South Asian countries that share a similar demographic of a younger population: reported Covid-19 deaths per million are 22 in Bangladesh and 28 in Pakistan.
Clearly, corrected for population size, India is doing far better than Europe and America. Yet, as Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank, says: "It is irresponsible to treat this as consolation".
Prof Basu told me there are limits to the value of geographical comparisons.
"As soon as you do that you realise India is doing very poorly. In China, Covid-19 deaths per million population is 3. In India it is 34. Within South Asia the only country doing worse than India is Afghanistan and going by the trends India will overtake Afghanistan."
Prof Basu says India is among the few countries where there has been no flattening of the curve. "From the end of March till now the cases and deaths are not just rising but doing so at a rising rate," he says.
Also, experts say, India's relatively low fatality rate doesn't tell the whole story, and some believe that there is substantial undercounting in several states.
For one, many states, in contravention of WHO guidelines, are not adding suspected cases in the final count.
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