"Need To Know Right Scale Of Catastrophe": Arvind Subramanian On 'Missing Deaths'
Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian speaks to NDTV On India's missing Covid deaths after a new study put the country's unaccounted fatalities close to 50 lakh.
Here are the highlights:
We need to be very clear, we will never have a satisfactory answer to this. The health information system is not as good
It is our best guess- it can be little less, it can be little more. Such high sero prevalence, such large population, this (number of deaths) is what we were expecting to find. We can't measure deaths in India reasonably
Age-specific number comes from international estimates. Chance of dying, if you are infected is more in India.
These are called all cause excess deaths which has become the standard way to measure deaths during a pandemic
The only question here is how much undercounting
It is an effort at arriving at what exactly happened
Nowhere in this study we said that the government is fudging data. We have traditional weakness in our capacity to do this. It is just that our systems are not as good as they should be
We all need to know the full scale of the catastrophe to learn a lesson and be prepared for future
The counting of the CRS deaths is available for seven states with good data and several cities. These seven states account for 50 per cent of India's population
For most of the states the data is till May, the June data isn't in yet. So, this is an ongoing process
In Uttar Pradesh, the study suggests the first wave death numbers are better recorded than the second wave. The second wave numbers are extremely low
There's no substitute for good government data based on surveys. That needs to be done efficiently and quickly. There has to be a kind of willingness to find out the real numbers.
In this pandemic, no government and society has come out looking good. All the countries have made serious mistakes
The state governments must also undertake serious surveys to know what happened. We need multiple sources.
Here are the highlights:
We need to be very clear, we will never have a satisfactory answer to this. The health information system is not as good
It is our best guess- it can be little less, it can be little more. Such high sero prevalence, such large population, this (number of deaths) is what we were expecting to find. We can't measure deaths in India reasonably
Age-specific number comes from international estimates. Chance of dying, if you are infected is more in India.
These are called all cause excess deaths which has become the standard way to measure deaths during a pandemic
The only question here is how much undercounting
It is an effort at arriving at what exactly happened
Nowhere in this study we said that the government is fudging data. We have traditional weakness in our capacity to do this. It is just that our systems are not as good as they should be
We all need to know the full scale of the catastrophe to learn a lesson and be prepared for future
The counting of the CRS deaths is available for seven states with good data and several cities. These seven states account for 50 per cent of India's population
For most of the states the data is till May, the June data isn't in yet. So, this is an ongoing process
In Uttar Pradesh, the study suggests the first wave death numbers are better recorded than the second wave. The second wave numbers are extremely low
There's no substitute for good government data based on surveys. That needs to be done efficiently and quickly. There has to be a kind of willingness to find out the real numbers.
In this pandemic, no government and society has come out looking good. All the countries have made serious mistakes
The state governments must also undertake serious surveys to know what happened. We need multiple sources.
