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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In Rural India, COVID-19 Outbreaks Have One Standout Feature: Speed -Murad Banaji, Aashish Gupta and Leena Kumarappan

In Rural India, COVID-19 Outbreaks Have One Standout Feature: Speed -Murad Banaji, Aashish Gupta and Leena Kumarappan

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published Published on Jun 18, 2021   modified Modified on Jun 18, 2021

-TheWire.in

If the current data is anything to go by, the low death figures reflect poor testing and recording rather than some natural “protection” from severe disease in rural India.

Many rural areas were hit hard during India’s devastating recent COVID-19 surge. The scale of this rural epidemic remains largely hidden in official figures. But a flood of news reports tell a tale of infection sweeping rapidly through villages, high mortality, minimal testing and health systems unable to keep up.

We collected a total of 61 case-studies from the first three weeks of May, each describing at least five suspected COVID-19 deaths in one or more villages. We searched the Hindi press for such reports, and hence the focus is on Hindi-speaking states.

Of the studies, 26 were from Uttar Pradesh, nine from Haryana, eight from Bihar and six each from Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. The details and links to the media reports are in this accompanying technical documentation (maths.mdx.ac.uk/research/modelling-the-covid-19-pandemic/ruralmortalityreports/).

A surge in mortality

The reports describe a total of 1,297 deaths from villages with an estimated combined population of around 480,000. This means that in these villages, taken together, around 0.27% of the population died of suspected COVID-19. In individual reports, this figure varied between 0.05% and 1% with a median value of 0.31%. This means that a typical village in this sample with 5,000 inhabitants would have seen around 15 deaths in the space of roughly as many days. Indeed, many reports described roughly one death a day.

There are several uncertainties. For example, some reports name all the deceased while others give an approximate figure reported by the village head. The reports cover periods ranging from under a week to over a month; but it is not always clear whether they describe all deaths in the village in these periods, or only those suspected to be from COVID-19. The death tolls may also be incomplete – outbreaks were often ongoing when journalists filed their reports, and sometimes follow-up reports give higher death counts.

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TheWire.in, 18 June, 2021, https://thewire.in/health/in-rural-india-covid-19-outbreaks-have-one-standout-feature-speed


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