A man provides a nasal sample for a COVID-19 test, October 13, 2022. Representative photo.
| Photo Credit: Velankanni Raj B./The Hindu
India may have had 11.9 lakh excess deaths due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, an international team of researchers has reported in the journal Science Advances.
The estimate is at odds with the Indian government’s repeated claim that far fewer people died than they would have without the pandemic in that year. It also stands on firmer footing than many previous estimates previous studies because the study’s authors used data from the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted in 2019-2021.
“Using this exceptionally large dataset helps to address major gaps in knowledge about pandemic mortality in India that stem in part from incomplete administrative data and low-quality survey data,” they wrote in their paper, published on July 19.
The researchers used NFHS-5 data collected in 2021, of 7.6 lakh people in households in 14 States and Union territories. This sub-sample, they wrote, is “representative of about one fourth of India’s population”. Based on this data, they found that the overall life expectancy in India in 2020 was comparable to that a decade prior, dropping by 2.6 years at birth between 2019 and 2020. This, they estimated, translated to a 11.9 lakh excess deaths around the country.
An important reason for the life expectancy decline is reportedly because more people aged younger than 60 years lost their lives in 2020. They also estimated the life expectancy of women at birth declined by one year more than it did for men at birth.
Based on numbers of the socio-economic indicators the NFHS tracks, the researchers also wrote, “Relative to high-caste Hindus, the gap in life expectancy at birth for [Scheduled Caste groups] increased from 4.5 years in 2019 to 5.9 years in 2020; for [Scheduled Tribe groups], it increased from 2.2 to 5.0 years, and for Muslims, it increased from 2.2 to 6.3 years.”
The study’s first author and a University of Oxford research fellow, Aashish Gupta, told PTI, “Marginalised groups already had lower life expectancy, and the pandemic further increased the gap between the most privileged Indian social groups, and the most marginalised social groups in India.”
By 2022, the U.S. had officially recorded the most number of deaths due to COVID-19. On the other hand modelling studies by various independent scientists had suggested India may have recorded the most deaths overall in 2020-2023, up to 5 million, due to COVID-19 as well as the lockdown and disruptions in global supply chains.
On July 20, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare issued a statement disputing the study’s findings, saying, “The excess mortality reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate. The study is erroneous and methodology followed by the authors has critical flaws; the claims are inconsistent and unexplainable. The all-cause excess mortality in 2020 compared with the previous year in India is markedly less than the 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper.”
The Ministry also disputed the study’s use of NFHS-5 data and said it wouldn’t be representative of national data. The paper had acknowledged this limitation: “Although our 2021 subsample is similar to the full NFHS-5 sample on many characteristics, the subsample has a different social and religious composition compared to the full sample” and that its data is “geographically clustered in 14 states and union territories. For these reasons, our results from analyses of the subsample may not provide a full understanding of changes in mortality at the national level…”
But the authors also added that “changes in mortality in this subsample might not have been so different from regions that are not in this subsample. India’s third national [seroprevalence survey] shows that disease spread was similar in the subsample states compared to states that were not in the subsample.”
The Ministry’s statement contended that another flaw was “related to possible selection and reporting biases in the included sample due to the time in which these data were collected, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
It also disagreed with the researchers’ statement in the paper that the NFHS-5 allowed an alternative window with which to estimate deaths to COVID-19 and its effects in India “considering administrative data from India’s Civil Registration System (CRS), which have been used for many existing estimates of excess mortality in India … do not capture all births and deaths, are unavailable for many states, and were disrupted by India’s severe lockdown in 2020.”
But the Ministry said the “Civil Registration System … recorded a substantial increase in death registrations (over 99%) in 2020”.
