What is the real death toll in India?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The chief scientist for the World Health Organisation acknowledges the frailty of the official numbers. Ed Butler speaks to Anthony Masters, the statistics ambassador for the UK's Royal Statistical Society who explains that one way to try to count the number of deaths is through excess deaths figures. But in countries like India there aren't very reliable national mortality statistics to start with, and there's often a long delay in delivering the latest numbers. One man who's done as much as any to sift through the data available is Murad Banaji, an Indian-born mathematician based at the University of Middlesex in the UK. He says the Indian death toll could be between three and eight times higher than the official data. (Picture: A relative of a Covid-19 patient cries in New Delhi, India. Picture credit: Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC, a sense of fatalism in India at the moment as the country's death toll spirals. |
| 0:11.2 | We can't get oxygen. The doctors are not giving injections or medicines. Whoever has to survive will survive. |
| 0:18.5 | Whoever has to die will die. The images of people dying outside hospitals are gripping the headlines. |
| 0:24.8 | It's clear, though, that many COVID deaths aren't even being recorded in the country. |
| 0:29.5 | We explore the real death toll in India and ask why we should all care. |
| 0:34.5 | It's a matter of natural justice, I would say, and accountability, |
| 0:38.6 | because it's important for government to take responsibility for the epidemic, |
| 0:43.3 | and you can't really do that on the basis of very limited data. |
| 0:47.0 | Tracking the real death toll. |
| 0:49.2 | That's today's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:54.7 | Well, the current crisis in India, it may echo that of many countries around the world over the last year, |
| 1:01.4 | but in some ways, the scale of the COVID infection rate there looks a bit different. |
| 1:08.0 | As the BBC's Yogita Lamai recently reported from one North Indian city, |
| 1:12.8 | Varanasi, it's not just hospitals, but the cremation services that are now being overwhelmed |
| 1:19.2 | by the death toll. |
| 1:23.8 | The rural hospital in Jaunpur is run down and ill-equipped. |
| 1:28.6 | We see COVID patients and people with other illnesses being treated in the same room. |
| 1:33.8 | The sick are being cared for by their own families for a lack of doctors. |
| 1:38.2 | In the intensive care unit, there's water all over the floor from overflowing toilets. |
| 1:43.9 | We've got to be there. This is how come. There's water all over the floor from overflowing toilets. |
| 1:51.6 | Outside the hospital, we meet Pankaj Morya. |
| 1:55.8 | His 35-year-old wife, Reikha died of COVID-19. |
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