Covid-19 toll goes past 400k mark

While the pandemic has been in the country for a year and four months, data shows that more than 60% of all officially reported deaths have come in just the past four months (from March this year), or during India’s second wave of infections.

The death toll from Covid-19 in India surpassed the 400,000 mark on Sunday, a grim milestone that comes at a time when several reports have emerged in recent weeks showing that the death toll from the country’s brutal second wave appears to be significantly higher than what official numbers suggest.

India's death toll from Covid-19 surpassed the 400,000 mark on Sunday. (Sanjeev Verma/HT)

While the pandemic has been in the country for a year and four months, data shows that more than 60% of all officially reported deaths have come in just the past four months (from March this year), or during India’s second wave of infections.

On Friday, 857 new deaths were reported across the country, taking the total number of fatalities from the viral disease to 400,364, according to HT’s Covid-19 dashboard.

The past month-and-a-half has also been marked by a series of states such as Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Bihar, etc, adding old fatalities that had gone unreported, pushing up daily death numbers in the country.

This reconciliation exercise is reflected in the country’s rate of daily deaths. The seven-day average of daily infections in the country has dropped to 1,000 fatalities a day in the past week, from a peak of 4,191 for the week ending May 23 – a drop of 76%. This reconciliation, in fact, also started giving the Covid-19 death wave a sharp (and artificial) push for a seven-day period between June 9 and June 15 (see chart).

The past month-and-a-half has been marked by states adding old unreported covid fatalities. (HT)

The corresponding drop in daily cases, meanwhile, has been more prominent – seven-day average of daily cases has fallen 88% (from a May 9 peak of 391,819 to 46,937 in the past week).

Meanwhile, in the past few weeks, a series of news reports published have used data from the Civil Registration System (CRS) – a national system of recording all births and deaths, under the Office of the Registrar General of India – to calculate the “excess mortality” reported across several states such as Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh.

The analysis by three news organisations – Scroll, The Hindu and The News Minute – showed that the number of excess deaths in these states was as high as 42 times and as low as 4.8 times that of the officially reported Covid-19 fatalities during the second wave.