World
Brown Dean estimates India has 25k deaths daily
Ashish Jha, Dean at Brown University School of Public Health, has estimated that the true number of Covid daily toll in India may be as much as 25,000 deaths.
In a thread posted on twitter, Jha has asked that crematoriums be looked at to gauge the true number of fatalities. "India reports another 400,000+ cases, 4000+ death day. A sustained level of horribleness. And its not correct," he begun.
"True number surely closer to 25,000 deaths, 2-5 million infections today," he added, then went on to give his rationale for forming the estimate.
"During non-pandemic year 2019, about 27,000 Indians died on typical day. Crematoriums handle that level of deaths every day. Additional 4,000 deaths won't knock them off their feet," he penned down, stressing that crematoriums across the country reporting are now reporting two to four times the load now. Which means, double or even quadruple.
"So best estimate 55K to 80K people dying daily in India.If you assume baseline deaths of 25-30K, COVID likely causing additional 25K to 50K deaths daily.Not 4,000," he stated.
Dr. Jha then moved on to infections and discussed
Infection Fatality Ratio (IFR)
"In India, at least 1% right now. You might say -- woah, that's high. In US its about 0.6% and India has a younger population," he said, however he added that the Indian healthcare system has collapsed. "People dying for lack of oxygen.So IFR of 1% is reasonable, may even be too low. Which would put daily infections at 2.5 to 5 million per day," he said.
He then concluded the thread by stating that India can't be experiencing 4K deaths a day. "If it were, it would barely be blip in the background.Instead, seeing crematoriums running 24/7 and running out of firewood, means the number of deaths from COVID at least closer to 25K, may be much more."
In his chilling final tweet he penned down an old saying in global health, "You can ignore, fail to test for, or undercount whatever disease you want.But you can't ignore the dead.In India, the dead are telling us the disease is much worse than the official statistics. And we have to listen."
India has been reporting over 400,000 positive cases of the novel coronavirus for the past four days. Saturday's positive cases were at 403,738 taking the total official number to 22,296,414. The official death toll for the day was 4,092. The number of active cases now stands at 37,366,648.
Goa will go under lockdown from Sunday, while Tamil Nadu from Monday. Karnataka government has imposed lockdown-like restrictions as the state has been witnessing near 50,000 cases daily for the past few days. Kerala is under a nine-day lockdown from Saturday.