Thread by @ArielKarlinsky

More estimates of excess mortality in India coming out. This time from @JustinSandefur @arvindsubraman @abhishekecon.
How do these compare with other countries in #WorldMortality? It goes right up the "leaderboard" as you can see.

1

Low or high estimate, India total excess mortality is much higher than the previous top (US) at 3.4 or 4.9 MILLION excess deaths.

But India is HUGE. @UNStats population estimate at over 1.38 BILLION people -> high excess per pop size, goes down to 9th place. low: 24th.

2

The undercount ratio, excess deaths divided by official reported COVID death counts for the same time period (end of June 2021 in this case) is very high in these estimates for India: 8.5 to 12.25 times officially reported deaths (~400 thousand). 6-7th place.

3

The p-score, the increase in mortality divided by the expected mortality is either 42% (the high estimate) putting India at 7th place or 23% (low estimate) which places it at 38th place.

4

This comparison shows what many in India and across the world have been saying: excess deaths are much larger than reported, and India is not exceptionally good at dealing with it, it's also not exceptionally bad (there are worse, depends on the metric).

5

A word of caution: #WorldMortality estimates are derived using the same exact model for expected deaths and are thus comparable. Since there are not yet good national data for India, estimates differ and thus comparison is ess valid. But I think these are within ballpark.

6

Anand, Sandefur & Subramanian: cgdev.org/sites/default/…

World Mortality: elifesciences.org/articles/69336

Leffler estimate: India excess <2M researchgate.net/publication/35…

Malani & Sabareesh: 2.7-4M excess.

https://twitter.com/ArielKarlinsky/status/1413497946650255362