Even as data has come flooding in, there is so much we do not know about India’s Covid-19 epidemic. Eighteen months on, we have only a few ...
Even as data has come flooding in, there is so much we do not know about India’s Covid-19 epidemic. Eighteen months on, we have only a few clues about how the epidemic evolved in a landscape of huge inequalities. Which communities have been hit hardest? How do poverty, caste, and religion, affect your chances of dying from the disease?
Covid-19, unlike tuberculosis, is not primarily a killer of the poor. But, like TB, it spreads most easily in crowded housing. Factors such as malnutrition and poor access to healthcare make severe disease and death more likely.
At the same time, the ways Covid-19 data is gathered and reported tend to mask the toll on more marginalised communities. Access to testing and hospital care reflect privilege. Where these are available, more cases and deaths get recorded. Official manipulation of data can further obscure the impact on communities with limited power to make their stories heard.
Uncounted pandemic deaths
Thanks to the efforts of journalists, we now have a source of information beyond official Covid-19 statistics: death registration data. This adds a new and important tool to help us unravel the story of India’s epidemic. The data is neither complete nor always easy to interpret; but for some cities and...
