It seems that there is no more hiding in the Covid death toll in India. The declaration by the World Health Organisation (WHO) of 4.7 million as ‘excess’ Covid deaths over and above the officially acknowledged figure in India and the response of the Modi government to the report are both shocking, but not surprising. The WHO has only stated what the Indian public has known as a fact about the high covid death toll but vehemently denied it by the Modi government in its desperation to claim success in dealing with the pandemic. The report also agrees with the disturbing visuals flashed on television screens across the world of crematoriums and funeral grounds bursting in their seams, funeral pyres burning non-stop, bodies floating in the river as well as victims dropping dead in the middle of roads outside hospitals as they struggle to breathe. The government has questioned the methodology and data collection used for arriving at the number by WHO. It has also challenged the robustness and validity of the models followed by the world body.
For the statistically minded, the claim by the Modi government putting the total death toll due to covid at below 5 lakh is untenable. Going by the government’s claim, the daily average deaths for the two years of 2020 and 2021 work out to less than 700. There is no way such a small number could exert pressure on burial and funeral facilities nationally to create the highly disturbing scenes that were seen around hospitals, funeral grounds, crematoriums, and river banks. At the peak of the pandemic, Delhi’s crematoriums and burial grounds alone reported about 1,000 funerals over three days, making it more than 300 per day. Going by the average of 700 deaths per day nationally, this would mean that nearly half of all covid deaths in India occurred in Delhi, with the rest of the country contributing the other half. Nothing can be more absurd than such an assumption. So, if an expert body says the figure was 10 times more, that is no cause for uneasiness.
The Modi government certainly has an agenda in keeping the death toll low, while WHO has no such hang-ups as the world body is only interested in dealing with the pandemic as best as humans can. It is not just India that the WHO has faulted for under reporting covid death tolls, it has blamed most countries in this respect. It is through this process that the Modi government’s obsession with success is frustrating. There is no need for the government to feel any sense of guilt because covid was a natural occurrence. It is like a government trying to suppress the death toll in an earthquake, which happens due to tectonic factors beyond human control. The onus of a government for such a natural calamity is quite far-fetched because these occur due to shifts in the tectonic plains over long periods, which are beyond the scope of any particular government. Nobody blames a government for an earthquake. If the world has failed to fight covid early enough to prevent such large-scale deaths, it is the manifestation of a human failure, and not the failure of any government, although there may have been areas where the government could have performed better.
