The problem is that 85 of the 194 countries surveyed by the WHO Technical Advisory Group that came up with the new estimate do not have good enough mortality records for this to be a viable method. Forty-one of those countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.
For these countries, a team led by statistician Jonathan Wakefield of the University of Washington in Seattle used data from countries with complete death records to build another statistical model that could predict the total number of COVID deaths in any given month from other measures, including temperature. , the percentage of COVID tests that come back positive, the strictness rating of social distancing and other measures to limit infection, and rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease — conditions that put people at higher risk of dying from COVID.
In response to the New York Times article, the Indian Ministry of Health strongly objected to this model. But the WHO team did not use it to estimate Indian COVID deaths. India belongs to an intermediate group of countries with reasonably good data on total deaths in some regions but not in others. So Wakefield’s team used data from 17 Indian states with adequate mortality records, applied the standard excess mortality method used for countries with complete mortality records, and then extrapolated from these states to the entire country.
“We base our predictions on how many people died in India in those two years only on Indian data,” Wakefield told BuzzFeed News.
Importantly, the WHO’s estimates of Indian Covid deaths align well with other studies, including one published in the journal Science in January by a team led by Prabhat Jha, director of the Global Health Research Center at the University of Toronto in Canada. Jha’s team estimated Covid deaths from Indian government data and a national survey of 137,000 people, conducted by a polling company, which asked people if a family member had died from COVID. “India has pretty high cellphone coverage and they’ve done random digit dialing,” Jha told BuzzFeed News.
Jha’s team estimated that more than 3.2 million people died of COVID in India by July 2021, most of them between April and June 2021 during the devastating surge in COVID caused by the delta coronavirus mutation. Modi had relaxed COVID controls after an earlier, less severe wave. “The Indian government declared victory and said ‘Oh India has defeated this virus’ and complacency started,” Jha said.
This explains the political sensitivity in India about accepting the results of studies that suggest higher death tolls than the official count. Responding to a question by opposition Congress Party leaders about Jha’s study in February, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare described it as “speculative” and claimed it had “no peer-reviewed scientific data” – despite it being published in one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed scientific journals.
“It’s politics,” Jha said of the Indian government’s rejection of his study.
According to the WHO, Egypt has the largest count of epidemic deaths proportionally, with excess deaths 11.6 times higher than the toll attributed to COVID. India ranks second with 9.9 times more deaths than its official COVID death toll. Russia, meanwhile, reported 3.5 times fewer deaths from COVID than its higher mortality would indicate.
Ariel Karlinski of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, another member of the WHO technical advisory group, hopes the agency’s “seal of approval” for higher mortality calculations will encourage countries to come up with more realistic numbers. “Putin doesn’t know who I am, but he knows WHO,” he told BuzzFeed News.
But instead of moving to correct their COVID death numbers, some governments are now withholding all-cause mortality data used to calculate additional deaths. Belarus appears to be undercounting its Covid deaths by a factor of about 12, Karlinsky said, having stopped reporting its all-cause death data to the UN. “Sections on deaths have disappeared.”
Right now, the main concern is China, which is experiencing a significant wave of the Omicron coronavirus variant but is reporting suspiciously few deaths. Zha fears that if the wave now hitting Shanghai and other cities matches the pattern seen in Hong Kong since February, up to a million Chinese people could die.
Some countries have responded to most death penalty studies with greater accountability and transparency. After earlier excess death analyzes suggested Peru was underreporting its COVID deaths by a factor of 2.7, the South American nation reviewed its medical and death records in detail and revised its death toll for May 2021. It now reports the highest official per capita death rate from COVID of any nation. “Peru did what I like every country to do,” Karlinski said.
The WHO’s new estimates of total excess pandemic deaths include people who died from other causes because health systems were overwhelmed and people who were killed by the coronavirus.
Karlinski, an economist, began analyzing the high number of deaths because he wondered if “the cure was worse than the disease” — specifically, he feared that lockdowns could cause more deaths than the coronavirus, in part through an increase in suicides. But the data told a different story.
In countries like New Zealand that have strict lockdowns but low levels of COVID, there is no sign of many deaths. There is no evidence of a global epidemic of suicide during the pandemic – in the US, suicides actually decreased. Only in some countries, such as Nicaragua, where people seem to avoid going to the hospital out of worry about getting infected, according to Karlinski, there are signs that deaths from other causes, such as heart disease, are on the rise.
“Excess mortality equals COVID mortality,” he said.
