Covid-19: India excess deaths cross four million, says study

Its fairly straightforward. The number of deaths under a given circumstance have its natural uncertainty and fluctuation that's captured by its statistical variance. One compares the recorded deaths during Covid period against the typical number of deaths during a comparable situation, account for the natural fluctuation, what remains is the excess death that cannot be explained by natural fluctuation of these numbers.

With presence of Covid being the significant way in which the scenarios are different, it can be claimed with statistical accuracy which are the excess deaths that happened as a result of Covid, either directly or because of other factors influenced by Covid (Oxygen shortage being one such example).

That said, those close to the government and its agenda will leave no stone unturned to dispute and discredit this study. As long that's an informed, good faith and rational argument I dont mind at all. I do have serious doubts on whether majority of the disputing and discrediting will be based on good faith.

Ah! downvotes. Why am I not surprised.

Also because, although I agree with you, 99.9+% of BBC visitors don't care and won't click it, and some high proportion of the remainder won't have access to more than the abstract, another will immediately bounce because they clicked accidentally or didn't realise studies had lots of boring words and weren't YouTube videos of exciting lab experiments with white coats, etc.

"Excess deaths are a measure of how many more people are dying than would be expected compared to the previous few years.

Although it is difficult to say how many of these deaths have been caused by Covid-19, they are a measure of the overall impact of the pandemic."

Unless you have an alternative explanation, it's a fairly reasonable assumption. In fact it's arguably more reliable in aggregate than trying to positively identify the cause of death for each victim, given the magnitude of the number. That wouldn't work for smaller effects though.

India economy has already been eroded with lockdowns and huge expenses on vaccines being given out for free, and now you have to pay those who died too.

The science and maths of these things are quite well understood and one can give Bayesian credible bounds, or frequentist prediction interval bounds for these quantities.

I also have no doubt that those close to the government will no doubt try everything possible to deny, dispute and discredit these numbers because it does not show a pretty picture.

We have data of how many people died (from all causes) for every year from around 1960 to now, getting more accurate as time went on. Certainly for 2000 until now the numbers are very dependable.

We can graph it, see abnormalities, and have very accurate estimates of how many people are expected to die next year in any given country.

Suddenly, for the first time in many, many decades, the estimates from 2019 about 2020 were wildly low. In virtually every country in the world more people died than would have ever been predicted, and suddenly decades and decades of accurate estimations are out the window. Again in 2021 the deaths are way up.

How can you possibly explain so many "extra" or "unpredictable" deaths after decades of numbers that perfectly matched estimates based on previous years?

Do you shut down a country, causing starvation and lack of medical care OR do you attempt business as usual with masks?

People are going to die, the question is how to limit it, and who gets priority.

So no wonder that the ruling party and those that are close to their agenda will take every steps possible to discredit the numbers.

The tobacco industry did and does the same to studies that demonstrated the harmful effects of cigarette via statistical studies. Galileo was discredited by the church ...

This is how the game is played

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/how-not-to-do-an-...

> In mid-April [of 2020], an eye-catching statistic appeared in the news: the number of people who’d been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the California county of Santa Clara was 50 to 85 times higher than thought. While just 956 cases of COVID-19 had been officially recorded by April 1, the true number of infections was between 48,000 and 81,000, outlets reported.

> These elevated numbers were reassuring, some outlets noted, because they suggest that most SARS-CoV-2 infections are milder than feared—a point seized on by conservative political commentators and some of the study’s own coauthors as support for the view that restrictive lockdown measures are an overreaction.

Didn't pan out.

Add to it the spread of the narrative that cow urine and cow dung, whether you wallow in it or drink or eat it, its going to protect you from Covid, a narrative that's very dear to the ruling party, and pushed by their members in parliament and members in legislative assemblies.

The consequences were hardly surprising.

This doesn't really follow from your numbers.

If it did indeed kill 4M people, that's a nearly 50% annual increase in mortality for India, largely within a few months, despite restrictions and mitigations.

For example the 2019 numbers subtracted from 2018 numbers wouldnt be zero. There will be some systematic trends, seasonal variations and some unexplained fluctuations. This requires some model fitting that uses not only past mortality data but also the usual macroeconomic data. Once you are at a point where you see that there are no systematic pattern in the error between the predicted number and the actual numbers, that this error is equally likely to be an over-estimate as an under estimate, then you would be in a position to use the model.

> The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.

This sort of mindset could be running and destabilising society. But, really, it isn't.

It feels to me obvious why millions of people, looking at their TVs, far away from the-reality-on-the-ground would be afraid and paranoid. It's less obvious why everyone isnt.

I think this says something hopeful about how governable and mature civilisation at-this-unprecendented-scale happens to be.

Indeed.

Wikipedia:

> An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually ten...

An order of magnitude seems to usually mean something at least multiplied by 10. 400,000 times 10 is 4 million.

Yes? I mean, the UK has had 129k deaths and the government's approval rating remains leading the opinion polls of voting attention.

The statistical deaths of strangers just don't move the needle in politics.

Most of my Indian relatives and family (who all live in India) find this 10x under-reporting very plausible.