Well if you are asking in good faith, then deep dive and find out if the allegation made here are true or not
The Govt of India has basically stated that Economist peddled baseless allegations and if look deeper you will see it is wrong and in deliberate bad faith.
here is another indicator of bad faith from Economist since you are all in on thinking critically. Since it it paywalled , I have outlined it
https://outline.com/mumxhq
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True, the official death toll has fallen steadily for the past month, to half its peak of over 4,000 a day in mid-May. But evidence continues to accumulate that the government’s numbers represent a disturbingly small fraction of the real figure. This discrepancy does not just mean that the true level of India’s suffering has been glossed over. It has made the crisis worse, for instance by causing authorities to underestimate demand for oxygen and drugs.
News organisations including The Economist, as well as independent epidemiologists, have speculated that India has suffered perhaps five-to-seven times more “excess deaths” than the official number of covid-19 fatalities, currently just over 355,000.
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The GoI press release has said that the methodology used by Christopher Leffler is not used anywhere else to estimate deaths.
You disagree and back it. Can you point out where this is accepted practice.
Using occam's razor. If cases & Deaths as 5-7 times, then this would be easily detectable, especially as the second wave dies down as per official figures.
So at peak the cases were 350,000 per day officially, as per economist it is over 2 million. This week the cases are 65k, so then it must be 380k cases as per economist. Same for deaths, officially 500 deaths and should be 3000 deaths as per economist.
Where are all these invisible cases & deaths?
If as per economist there were all these 5-7 times extra cases/deaths, the need for O2 would be far greater. There has been no crisi on that side for weeks now. Only for a 2 week period did capital Delhi have shortage due to the mismanagement of the state govt there that was pulled up by the courts.
So you are willing to consider opinion polling and patchy insurance claims( in a country that has minimal insurance coverage) that compared India with US figures over official figures that are collated by heath authorities.
It is far more believable that US media that has persistently painted India in negative light wants to continue the practice even when there are reasons to state facts as is and risk India being shown in a positive light.
I have already give you one data point where NPR pushed a untruth that you conceded. That was not even bad faith, direct fakery.
Is this how one thinks critically?
I have no problem if you want to believe fake news but lets drop the charade that you have no option other than trusting Economist or that they have a good track record. Information is easy to get in this day and age.
It is your laziness that lets such media spread fake news by appealing to your biases.
The actual numbers in India are alleged to be an order of magnitude higher than the official numbers. There have been articles like [1] trying to estimate the actual numbers. The OP is likewise citing an article that's saying actual numbers are six times higher. I do not have access to the cited article to say more.
I am objecting to people making up numbers, when no such data is available. Like the parent post for instance, connecting reports of crematoriums being full to order-of-magnitude scale (10X or more) undocumented Covid deaths.
There are however, other reports you can quote:
- The Print (not govt-leaning) "If you claim India’s Covid death toll is 2x govt figure, it’s understandable. But not 10x" [1]
- NYTimes: Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.” [2]
In short, I strongly feel throwing numbers around without basis simply widens the chasm.
While I don’t doubt that the actual deaths from covid is far higher than what’s officially reported, I find the attempts to come up with a multiplier amusing. India has never had high quality data to use as a baseline, even those reported from cities. Besides as others have pointed out, the actual cause of death reported isn’t necessarily accurate either. Which is why we see “studies” predicting the actual number to be anywhere from 3x to 10x.
> More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.
> Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven times higher than reported officially". A paper in The Lancet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research centre, uses subnational all-cause mortality data from 12 Indian states. They come close to the WHO's estimation.
There were similar claims last time as well. It seems Kerala reported 20k less deaths in 2020[1]. There might be disparity but saying 5x or 10x is too much.
They found that the total number of “all cause” deaths reported between May and August almost doubled in India compared with the same period in each of the past five years.
“Is that because the number of covid deaths in the country has been vastly underestimated?” I asked.
“It’s impossible to have a decisive answer,” Shah told me. “But the pattern of the excess deaths doesn’t really shout out covid as the cause. It just doesn’t... The telltale signatures of covid just aren’t there,” he said. He won’t venture any hypotheses about the cause of the excess deaths. But among the possible candidates are indirect consequences of the pandemic: wage loss, displacement, malnourishment, forced migration, and disruptions in health care...
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but anyways:
Maybe I should have added reliable to data.
I'm highly skeptical of the ~4000 deaths figure reported as the death count for China and I have the sense that the authors of the study were too or they would have included it in their study.
As for India, when you factor in rural areas, I don't think the reporting and data would be as reliable as for the US. [1]
To go back to my original point, I'm not arguing that the US successfully handled COVID. Nor am I trying to demonize China or India. I'm just saying that the author's decision of foregrounding absolute death toll over per capita is poor and misleading given the sample they used. It could be seen as bad faith on the part of the authors when the per capita number can support their argument just as well.
I'm just trying to understand how insensitive it is to comment on a thread where OP is clearly someone who has either suffered loss or has an entire network suffering loss, and then go full strong systemiser and ask for a reference.
The absurdity of asking is even stronger when almost any understanding of the situation on the ground in India would mean an understanding that there is widespread and systemic problems with data collection in India, essentially as there has been throughout the pandemic globally, reflecting the difficulty of determining infection rates, CFR vs IFR and deaths in a testing scarcity environment.
I don't know for sure but I would anticipate that there is a good chance that many indian deaths are never registered which would make other post pandemic methods of determining true 'excess mortality' very difficult.
The particular irony in this whole post extending from your question being that the BBC itself, in the linked article, in the second paragraph, states that 'experts say the real death toll is several times higher'.
Now that isn't your 1-2 magnitudes but you don't have to travel far from there to get those types of sources, but depending on how strong-systemiser you go on requiring hard numbers, the fact is no-one will ever know because no one is counting
"Estimating COVID-deaths with statistical confidence may prove elusive. But all estimates suggest that the death toll from the pandemic is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count of 400,000;"
But no one is adding this disclaimer, everyone is just parroting the 4 million number.
Another thing to ponder, if this amount of people had died, do foreigners really think Indian people would have sat silently? There may be underreporting or missing stats, but I doubt if it is a 10x difference.
Not fudged, deliberately and actively obfuscated, if we are talking Covid numbers. This is so that the enormity of the government does not come in the public domain. Their measures include instructing cremation places to record cause of death just as 'bimari' (Hindi for disease) and refrain from mentioning Covid, removing of shrouds over graves so that the otherwise unmarked thousands of shallow graves on riverine sandbars do not get counted by drone photography.
There is good faith incompetence and then there is deliberate cover up.
The government and their fanboys when describing government's purported achievements -- you are antinational, unpatriotic, treasonous to doubt our reliable data collected by our upstanding officials and members, you should go to Pakistan. Same government when questioned on Covid -- quality of data is very poor I reject all conclusions that do not show us in good light.
@eldaisfish I hope you are aware that the story that you have linked to points towards the rampant undercounting bias. The bias will only lead to gross undercounting of the deaths.
Feeling doesn't have anything to do with facts, as I pointed out to the other poster.
However in a situation with very little in the way of actual verifiable facts, what is someone actually asking for in terms of something that will support the evidence? What is a source in this environment? And at various thresholds of that, I will give you many sources (mostly medical) that will support 1-2 orders of magnitude increase.
The article itself says only 196 people died in Kanpur during a 3 week period, but there were 8,000 cremations (obviously not all covid related, and without a baseline I can't tell you where this sits, but there is an implied increase given the other statements about lack of cremation space)
I would also challenge your definition of 'significant'.
In the US last year, there was a 20% increase in excess deaths (0). Having an extra 20% of humans die in your country counts, I think, as significant.
Now granted it really depends on whether you are talking about India, the US, or the rest of the world but your statement is demonstrably false - in a country with good data, there were an extra 20% of humans dying last year; in a country with terrible data with an out of control epidemic and no way for people to isolate safely, the facts are we will probably never know what the true deaths are but if you're saying (and here a couple of things don't compute) about the same number of people are dying every year (?in India? how do you know that in the absence of data? and generally death statistics take several months to become solid) and the Ganges is a large river, are these two statements logically linked? And how?
Or... its being over reported in the west. US counts people who died with covid in the total number, maybe India is a bit more sensible in that regard.
Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags.
You don't even have to believe me. Just look up covid deaths for your city and then go to the city's largest crematorium and count the number of bodies in covid body bags.
(I know you just posted a tl;dr of the article and this is not necessarily your opinion.)
What I found interesting is that his analysis did not pick up the (now strongly evidenced) degree of inaccurate reporting from India. Indications are that India's covid deaths are between six and seven times higher than reported yet it looks pretty good on the Benford chart.
> Taken together, the researchers found that excess deaths were estimated to be in the range of 3.4 million to 4.7 million - about 10 times higher than India's official Covid-19 death toll.
The Govt of India has basically stated that Economist peddled baseless allegations and if look deeper you will see it is wrong and in deliberate bad faith.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/06/goi-rebuts-economist-report-...
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