We Must Assess Sudden Deaths Which Took Place as a Consequence of COVID-19
Abantika Ghosh
What is the statute of limitations for holding a government accountable for deaths that it had been in a position to prevent?
Once the fog of war lifts and the media is done with tales of machismo, lessons taught, and jets downed, this question will need to be asked.
This is something that people associated with the government at that time now admit in private with candour and the benefit of hindsight. Delays had happened in vaccine procurement and the government had been blindsided by the delta wave. It was caught napping in its obligation to prepare the health infrastructure when it had had a year to do so. But the official death data from 2021, that show that the year saw approximately 20 lakh more deaths than in 2020, opens up another more urgent need for introspection.
What is the link between COVID-19 sequelae and sudden death? A 2023 study by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) had concluded there is no link between the vaccine and sudden death but given ICMR’s complicity in keeping the real COVID-19 toll numbers under wraps, there may be a need for a more credible, preferably non-government-funded examination into this crucial question.
Day in and day out during the pandemic, including the devastating days of the delta wave when those of us covering the pandemic for various publications were inundated with requests for beds, oxygen cylinders and, finally, help in expediting last rites, government officials including ICMR scientists diligently told us all was well and India’s death rates were far lower than international numbers by what can only be termed statistical jugglery. Testing numbers were given in absolutes and cases and deaths as population percentages!
Now that the real numbers are out, the government owes it to those alive to honestly and truthfully seek answers about why all around us, we suddenly see young and apparently healthy people die without any previous signs of illness.
WHO wasn’t that far off the mark
As it happens, even the Civil Registration System (CRS) data may not reveal the actual number of excess deaths. This is because the estimate assumes that the upward trend of reducing gap between actual deaths and their registration – in 2019 it stood at 92% – continued through the pandemic. It also omits for the first time a crucial piece of data – the estimated births and deaths in the country.
But, there is another government document that may hold some clues. The National Family Health Survey 5 that collected data between 2019 and 2021 puts the death registration rate at a mere 71%. Going by the law of averages and also what was plausible given the situation that existed in the country in those three months when funeral pyres were lit like bonfires and rivers overflowed with bodies, the actual number for 2021 was likely much lower.
This then makes even the World Health Organisation figure of 47 lakh (4.7 million) excess deaths, that the government has so vehemently opposed at all fora and according to some reports had even attempted to stall release of, look like an underestimation. Incidentally, one of the arguments the government had used in their rebuttal was that the death registration rate in the country stood at a phenomenal 99%.
This new data therefore also calls for assessing in this light how many of these deaths could have been prevented if the government of India had not for its own inexplicable reasons refused to buy vaccines even as one company sat with a stockpile, indulged in vaccine maitri while Indians were dying and made the patently ludicrous decision of allowing the Kumbh Mela in the face of a surging pandemic.
Investigate sudden deaths, credibly
When in 2023 ICMR released its study exonerating COVID-19 vaccines in the surge in sudden, unexplained deaths in young adults that seems to have happened post pandemic, questions had been immediately raised about the methodology, lack of distinction between the various kinds of vaccines used – mRNA, live attenuated, vector-based – and some of the assumptions made in the study. In a letter to the Indian Journal of Medical Research, experts from D.Y. Patil Medical College and IIT Mumbai had called for a “multidisciplinary approach involving forensic experts, pathologists, geneticists and investigators, along with prospective cohort studies, (that)would enhance the robustness of findings in studies of this nature.”
Much water has flown down the then corpse-laden Ganga since the pandemic, books written and elections won on India’s COVID-19 “success” story; the fact that the CRS data, by providence or by design emerged in the middle of a raging war in the northern and western frontiers of the country has ensured Pakistan hogs the entire quota of the country’s outrage with none directed inwards for the perceived wrongs of the pandemic.
But there is a need to look beyond outrage, to the future and not to the past, to strategise and plan rather than to apportion blame. An impartial and unbiased examination into post-COVID-19 sudden deaths that looks at not just the effects of the vaccines but those of the disease itself over the long term is the need of the hour and not just in the spirit of scientific inquiry and political accountability. There is no reason to treat the consequences of COVID – if at all they are that – as a fait accompli.
The research may open up avenues for prevention of deaths that seem to be happening all around us of people in their very prime of life, in the years they would have been at their productive best. For solutions to be found, the problem has to be acknowledged and quantified first.
Lives lost to incompetent decision making during the pandemic will not come back; but the government owes this much to those that have survived it and then lived with the trauma of sudden irreparable losses. Acknowledge, enquire, understand and prevent if possible.
Abantika Ghosh is healthcare lead, Chase India. She authored the book Billions Under Lockdown: The Inside Story of India’s Fight Against COVID-19. She posts on X @abantika77. Views are personal.
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