The bit I found most interesting:

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...