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A spate of deaths from “fever” and “unknown causes” tore through rural India in April and May, coinciding with India’s second Covid-19 wave, new official data show. While deaths from clinically diagnosed respiratory infections surged too, the spurt of undiagnosed deaths points to the scale of potential undercounting of Covid-19 deaths in India.
The latest data from the National Health Mission’s Health Management Information System show nearly 3,00,000 more deaths in May 2021 compared to May 2019, which is more than 2.5 times India’s official Covid-19 death count for the same period.
Estimating undercounting
India’s official Covid-19 death toll is widely regarded to be an underestimate of the real toll. For reasons that are partly institutional and partly particular to the pandemic, official statistics are missing many Covid-19 deaths.
To estimate the scale of excess mortality during the pandemic, journalists and researchers have turned to data from India’s Civil Registration System to calculate the difference between deaths from all causes registered in 2020 and 2021, and those registered in 2019 and other pre-pandemic years, IndiaSpend reported in June. However, the data is incomplete and limited to officially registered deaths. We have been piecing together the true picture from the limited states for which data are available.
One other official source of data could provide further clues. The National Health Mission’s Health Management Information…