A non-government human rights group has estimated that between January 2020 and August 2021, Uttar Pradesh witnessed nearly 1.4 million excess deaths or nearly 60 times the state’s official Covid-19 death toll of 23,382 till Saturday.
Excess deaths means deaths over and above the figures expected going by past mortality rates. The report by the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), released to the media on Friday, implies that the excess deaths between January 2020 and August 2021 were all caused by Covid-19.
The CJP documented the increased death rates per 1,000 population across 129 urban and rural areas in four districts during 2020 and 2021, and extrapolated them to estimate the excess deaths across Uttar Pradesh. The four districts witnessed a 55 to 60 per cent increase in deaths (from all causes) between January 2020 and August 2021, the CJP said.
If these death rates are applied across the state, the CJP said, Uttar Pradesh would have witnessed 1.4 million excess deaths during the same 20-month period.
This would make Uttar Pradesh “one of the hardest-hit states” in the country with the “weakest” death recording, it said, adding that multiple testimonies from residents to the CJP team appear to corroborate the data.
A social scientist who helped the CJP analyse the data from the 129 areas was told by several local health workers and village panchayat heads that they did not know a single house where a person had not died of Covid-19, the CJP report said.
The report has cited instances where families grappled with a shortage of firewood for cremation, or with a lack of land to bury the dead.
Many public health experts have argued that India has undercounted its Covid-19 deaths. They say the crowds at crematoriums and funeral sites in multiple cities as well as the bodies in rivers during April-May 2021 indicated that Covid-19 was killing far more people than the country’s body disposal infrastructure could handle.
An independent scientist who was not associated with the CJP study but has been involved in assessing the country’s epidemic cautioned that the inferences in the CJP report hinged on “weak assumptions”.
The CJP analysis is based on complete death records from 2017 to August 2021 that its state team managed to collect from 129 rural and urban areas -- 104 in Varanasi, 23 in Ghazipur, and one each in Chandauli and Jaunpur.
Across the 129 areas surveyed, the annual number of recorded deaths increased from 1,292 in 2017 to 1,414 in 2018 to 1,737 in 2019 to 2,113 in 2020 to 2,568 in the first eight months of 2021.
The recorded deaths thus increased 9 per cent between 2017 and 2018, and 23 per cent between 2018 and 2019. The increases in recorded deaths during 2020 over 2019 and during 2021 over 2020 were about 22 per cent.
“There is no way one can conclude that the increase in 2020 and 2021 was entirely because of Covid-19,” said the scientist, who works in a central academic institution. “It may just be a result of year-on-year improved death reporting.”
However, if the 2021 figure is extrapolated to 12 months from eight, the year-on-year rise from 2020 is about 82 per cent.
The CJP has cited an increase in death rates from 6.4 per 1,000 people in 2019 to over 7.5 in 2020 and over 13.5 in 2021 as indicators of excess deaths under the epidemic.
Several research groups have since summer 2021 independently estimated Covid-19 death counts in India that are far higher than the official numbers.
Epidemiologist Prabhat Jha at the University of Toronto, Canada, and his colleagues had last year used three distinct lines of evidence to estimate that India’s count of Covid-19 deaths was between 3.1 million and 3.4 million by September 2021 -- 6 to 7 times the official count then.
