Many rural areas were hit hard during India’s devastating recent Covid-19 surge. The scale of this rural epidemic remains largely hidden in...
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 the accompanying technical documentation.
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...
