Counting India’s Dead is Difficult but Important to Help the Living

Funeral pyres in Uttar Pradesh

 

Link to the source article >> https://healthpolicy-watch.news/counting-indias-dead-is-difficult-but-important-to-help-the-living/

Most people die at home in Gadchiroli, a remote, heavily forested district in central India that is among the country’s least developed areas and reaching the nearest clinic can take several hours on foot.

After a death, relatives often bury or cremate their loved ones in the fields.

When the first COVID-19 wave arrived in India in 2020, it barely reached Gadchiroli. But in April 2021, as a devastating second wave tore through rural India, people began getting sick.

Yogesh Kalkonde, a public health doctor and researcher who worked with the non-governmental organization Search in Gadchiroli until July, said he soon began hearing about deaths in villages – sometimes four or five in a single small community.

People seriously ill with COVID-19 began turning up at his rural hospital. But Kalkonde said he had little way of gauging the extent of the outbreak.

Similar situations were playing out in other parts of India. While official figures recorded averages of around 3,000 or 4,000 COVID-19 deaths per day, analysts saw signs that mortality across the country was far higher. But they struggled to produce even rough estimates of the true toll.

Indeed, experts say that the pandemic has highlighted a longstanding issue: In the world’s second-most populous country, policymakers have historically paid too little attention to tracking people’s deaths, with serious implications for public health.

In fact, more than 100 countries do not have functioning civil registration and statistics systems that record births and deaths, according to the public health organisation Vital Strategies.

Several African countries collect little or no data on deaths, and the World Health Organization estimates that, globally, two-thirds of deaths are never accounted for.

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