![]() The reason is simple: Nearly everyone who contracts Covid-19 develops antibodies to fight it, leaving traces of the infection that the surveys can pick up.Įven a wide-scale serosurvey has its limitations, said Dan Weinberger, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. The antibody tests offer one way to correct official records and arrive at better estimates of total infections and deaths. ![]() Once researchers have figured out the share of those people whose blood is found to contain antibodies, they extrapolate that data point, called the seroprevalence, to arrive at an estimate for the whole population. ![]() In each serosurvey, a subset of the population (about 30,000 of India’s 1.4 billion people) is examined for Covid-19 antibodies. To arrive at more plausible estimates of Covid infections and deaths in India, we used data from three nationwide antibody tests, called serosurveys. Even before Covid-19, about four out of five deaths in India were not medically investigated.Ģ.0x the current reported total of 300,000 as of May 24. Laboratories that could confirm the cause of death are equally swamped, she said.Īdditionally, other researchers have found, there are few Covid tests available often families are unwilling to say that their loved ones have died of Covid and the system for keeping vital records in India is shaky at best. Because hospitals are overwhelmed, many Covid deaths occur at home, especially in rural areas, and are omitted from the official count, said Kayoko Shioda, an epidemiologist at Emory University. The undercount of cases and deaths in India is most likely even more pronounced, for technical, cultural and logistical reasons. On Friday, a report by the World Health Organization estimated that the global death toll of Covid-19 may be two or three times higher than reported. India’s official Covid statistics report 26,948,800 cases and 307,231 deaths as of May 24.Įven in countries with robust surveillance during this pandemic, the number of infections is probably much higher than the number of confirmed cases because many people have contracted the virus but have not been tested for it. The daily average is calculated with data that was reported in the last seven days. Why official data underrepresents India’s pandemicĪbout this data Source: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. ![]() More pessimistic ones show a toll on the order of millions of deaths - the most catastrophic loss anywhere in the world. In consultation with more than a dozen experts, The New York Times has analyzed case and death counts over time in India, along with the results of large-scale antibody tests, to arrive at several possible estimates for the true scale of devastation in the country.Įven in the least dire of these, estimated infections and deaths far exceed official figures. Estimating the true number of deaths requires a second layer of extrapolation, depending on the share of those infected who end up dying. Last week, India recorded the largest daily death toll for any country during the pandemic - a figure that is most likely still an undercount.Įven getting a clear picture of the total number of infections in India is hard because of poor record-keeping and a lack of widespread testing. The official Covid-19 figures in India grossly understate the true scale of the pandemic in the country. 26 infections per reported case with an infection fatality rate of 0.60%
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