Even though it has been over a year since there has been a massive outbreak of the deadly coronavirus around the globe, the present Indian situation clearly stands out. Patients are begging for oxygen, hospitals are unable to handle the surge, and death announcements, body bags and piling funeral pyres are all that’s left in the pandemic’s wake.
Experts advise that official COVID-19 estimates from the world’s second most populated country are likely an underestimation due to rising daily case counts. However, what’s the reason behind Indian data’s inaccuracy? How trustworthy is the data as compared to other countries’ reporting? What kind of data can provide an accurate picture of the crisis there?
Is India keeping track of all COVID cases?
Counting every coronavirus case would be an absolute impossibility for any government. In the majority of cases, only verified cases are reported in the official tallies across the world. Testing is sloppy because of the sheer number of tests and because a few persons who have been infected with the coronavirus show very little or no symptoms.
The fewer tests that are performed, the more errors go undetected. According to the World Health Organization, governments should do ten to thirty tests for each case that has been verified.
Our World in Data claims that India conducts roughly five tests for every verified case. According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. does around 17 separate laboratory testing on each confirmed case. In Finland, they do about 57 separate tests on each suspected case.
“People who aren’t getting tested are still in the majority,” Dr. Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto has noted. “Complete homes are full of positive cases or are infected. In the event when one person is tested in the house and test results show they are positive, and everyone else in the house also has symptoms, then they definitely have COVID. Why then, would someone want to be tested then?”, she argues.
In light of India’s prior increase in the total number of people infected with the virus, Jha predicts that the genuine numbers are at least 10 times higher than the reported figures.
Do we also account for deaths?
Although the overall number of deaths gives a clearer representation of the pandemic curve, it is also clear that there are issues with the data in this instance too.
India’s largest disadvantage is what’s happening in rural areas, according to Jha. People in rural areas die at home without medical assistance far more frequently than is known, and this is why many of these fatalities go unreported. A majority of people prefer to handle their own funeral arrangements themselves rather than have someone else handle the funeral for them. Seventy percent of all deaths in rural India each year happen inside rural dwellings.
It can be done to count fatalities in remote areas, as has been demonstrated by the Million Death Study. An on-the-ground pre-pandemic effort in rural India employed in-person surveys to quantify fatalities and collect symptoms and circumstances. After all verbal autopsies were examined and documented by doctors, the numbers were compared to mortality estimates from in-person surveys.
Data on mortality may be undercounted in many low or middle-income nations, but it should be doing better than that, Jha maintains.
The country is one of the few in the world to have a space program. In other words, just tallying the deceased is only a basic job. She expects India to perform far better in the future.
Does it matter?
Understanding the scale and extent of the epidemic, as well as how it is evolving, assists authorities and health professionals in planning their actions.
Despite the recognized flaws in the statistics, the trend of COVID-19 infections and fatalities in India is a sobering reminder of how the virus may spread rapidly through a mostly uninfected community when safeguards are abandoned.
What occurs in India affects the entire global community, says Dr. Amita Gupta, head of the Johns Hopkins India Institute. According to him, concerned from three perspectives: humanitarian, health security, and public health.
