Amjed Jaaved
With over 2, 38,000 COVID-19 patients already dead (official estimate) since March 2020, India presents a horrible picture. About 4000 people are dying every day.Experts are skeptical of the government’s figures of cumulative and daily deaths. They point out that most COVID-19 deaths remain unreported and unrecorded. Murad Banaji, a senior lecturer in mathematics at Middlesex University agrees, ‘80% of India’s COVID-19 deaths are are missing and have not been picked up by official death count’. He made the remarks during the course of his interview with renowned journalist Karan Thapar (The Wire magazine). Mr. Banaji has closely tracked ebbs and flows in COVID-19 wave in India during the period March 2020 to May 2021.
A boy at the funeral of his father in Delhi on April 24. | Adnan Abidi/Reuters
The crisis caused by the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a revival of interest in mathematical models for the progression of the pandemic. Several modellers have made public predictions for the size and duration of the second wave. These modellers suggest that they can predict the future, and their models carry the imprimatur of science. So it is natural that people are very interested in what they have to say.
However, we would like to explain why such predictions are often misleading. Mathematical models are used successfully in many branches of science. But the models that have been constructed for the pandemic suffer from serious theoretical problems and have a poor empirical record of predicting its course over the past year.
Experts estimate COVID-19 death toll in India at over one million
Millions of Indians continue to suffer as COVID-19 takes thousands of lives and new infections are recorded every day. On May 9, the country passed another grim milestone of almost 22.3 million coronavirus cases, after reporting 403,738 new cases in the previous 24 hours. The official death toll climbed by 4,092 to 242,362.
India, which has experienced 10 million new cases in the last four months, now accounts for 20.24 percent of all active cases and 7.12 percent of all deaths globally.
The figures find concrete expression in the grim news reports of frantic scenes at hospitals, overcrowded crematoriums and round-the-clock pyres burning in city after city across the country, including in the national capital, Delhi.
by Kumar David
There have been a couple of interesting developments in India, a new star in the Lok Sabha and recent State elections, which I am sure will interest my readers. A meteor detonated in the in any case rumbustious chamber of the Indian Parliament and it has for a change been a woman. State Elections have been a moderate, but only moderate setback for Modi and the BJP but since there is no sign of an alliance that can be cobbled together to form an alternative government, on current trends India is heading for an inclusive result in 2024.
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Karan Thapar and Murad Banaji. Photo: The Wire
A senior lecturer in mathematics at London’s Middlesex University, who has been closely tracking the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in India since its start in March 2020, believes that 80% of India’s COVID-19 deaths are missing and have not been picked up by the official death count. As of May 8, the official death count is just over 238,000 and Murad Banaji says this means that the unrecorded deaths will be five times greater, putting the total death count (official and unrecorded deaths combined) at one million, if not more.
In a 33-minute interview to Karan Thapar for