Excess mortality in India during the COVID 19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Introduction: COVID 19 has proven to be the worst pandemic in the history of mankind. While the pandemic still continues to perplex the scientists globally, attempts are being made to quantify the mortality caused by the pandemic. The official Covid-19 figures in India grossly understate the true scale of the pandemic in the country. Definitions A COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19 disease (e.g. trauma). Excess mortality is defined as the difference in the total number of deaths in a crisis compared to those expected under normal conditions. Methods: We researched multiple papers on Pubmed, Medline, Embase, MedRxiV pre print. Discussion: All the studies showed that the excess mortality was to the tune of almost three times the official figures. The model based excess mortality assumptions showed higher deaths as compared to the data based. However, there were lot of discrepancies in the data provided by various states along with variations observed in between the two waves as well. Health survey data suggested higher mortality rate as compared to data compiled from the civil registration system. Conclusion: Official COVID-19 deaths have entirely failed to capture the scale of pandemic excess mortality in India. The under-ascertainment of COVID-19 deaths has been high, with around 8-10 excess deaths for every been high for every recorded COVID-19 death.