As a report explains, a handful of states are heavily attributing Covid-19 deaths to patients’ underlying conditions or co-morbidities. Also, different Indian states are using different COVID-19 diagnostic tests.Two states, Gujarat and Telangana, appear to have under-counted heavily, as an investigation shows. In Vadodara, Gujarat, the number of deaths grew by just 49% in the last two months, even as the caseload leapt by a whopping 329%. Also,  there have been reported discrepancies between the official toll from the virus and counts from crematoria and burial grounds in some cities.

No, absolutely not. The low death rate is NOT entirely a misreporting or miscalculation. Many epidemiologists attribute this relatively low fatality rate to a young population – the elderly are typically more vulnerable. But it is not clear whether other factors, such as immunity deriving from previous infections from other coronaviruses, are also responsible. Also, they point to a pattern of low mortality in South Asian countries that share a similar demographic of a younger population: reported Covid-19 deaths per million are 22 in Bangladesh and 28 in Pakistan. Clearly, given the population size, India is doing far better than Europe and the United States. But Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank, told in a BBC report: “It is irresponsible to treat this as consolation. There are limits to the value of geographical comparisons. As soon as you do that, you realise India is doing very poorly. In China, Covid-19 deaths per million population is 3. In India it is 34. Within South Asia, the only country doing worse than India is Afghanistan and going by the trends, India will overtake Afghanistan.”