| | | Good morning! | | Anyone with a scientific bent of mind would have known that Covid-19 deaths were understated everywhere. Some of the understatement rose from the difficulty of keeping track; and some, from the well-intentioned desire to not create panic, and the not-so-well-intentioned one to look good. I wrote about this during the pandemic — when I put out a daily column for almost 350 days, with a break coinciding with the lull between the first and second waves – and also in an early edition of my weekly newsletter, in April 2022, when the pandemic was almost over. In light of the data released last week, amidst the noise of Operation Sindoor, it may be pertinent to remind everyone of what I said in 2022 : So, how many people in India died from the pandemic? The answer to this question depends on assumptions. One, how many infections were there for every recorded case? Was it 10, 15, or 20? Seroprevalence (the presence of antibodies in the population) data would suggest a number of 20 – working backward, that would mean India’s 43 million recorded cases to date translate into 860 million infections. That, in turn, translates into an exposure rate of 66%, which is actually lower than that cited by various experts on the proportion of the Indian population exposed to the virus. A conservative estimate, in India, would be 15 – and that would translate into 645 million cases and an exposure rate of almost 50%. Two, what is the infection fatality rate? Is it, as Murad Banaji and John PA Ioannidis said in separate papers (both well regarded, but dated), 0.23%? Or is it lower? Does it change by demographic profile of a nation? Does it change by per capita income? Could India have a lower than 0.23% IFR, say 0.115%? I mentioned these assumptions in May 2021 in the column on Covid I used to write. What does this mean for India’s death toll? For an infection fatality rate of 0.23%, at the higher end of the estimate (20 infections for every recorded one), it would mean almost two million dead. At the conservative end (15 infections), it would mean almost 1.5 million dead. And at the lower end of the estimate (10 infections), it would mean a million dead. And for an infection fatality rate of 0.115%, the number of dead would range from 645,000 to 1.29 million, still higher than the official records. That’s a broad range — 645,000 to 2 million. This is not to suggest this was the actual death toll from the pandemic — although it is very likely that the actual number falls in this range — but merely to highlight how, in the absence of actual numbers, estimations can arrive at widely varying results. The numbers are interesting because the data from three reports released by the Registrar General of India shows that India may have recorded almost two million extra deaths in 2021, the worst year of the pandemic. The number doesn’t necessarily mean that all the excess deaths were caused by Covid-19; but it does point to the very strong likelihood that death numbers were understated, by some extent. A briefing by government officials skirted the issue – they didn’t deny the number – by saying it still meant India’s death toll was lower than the estimate put out by the World Health Organization. My colleague Abhishek Jha, the first to report on the two million excess deaths, followed up by parsing the data, showing that the problem of undercounting was widespread across Indian states and that an overloaded medical system may have been to blame – after all, between 2019 and 2021, the proportion of deaths in the absence of medical attention rose by almost 13 percentage points, from 34.5% to 47.3%. As I’ve often said, sometimes it doesn’t feel so good to be right. | | Drawing the line I have no idea why the government chose to release the data in the middle of Operation Sindoor; it could have waited. There was enough going on last week (apologies may be due here; it’s the reason there wasn’t an edition of the newsletter). That India would respond to the terror attack in Pahalgam that killed 26 people, all men, 25 of them tourists and 24, Hindus, was a given. The response, when it came, was targeted and spectacular – nine locations in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, either HQs of or facilities associated with terror groups were bombed by India. Pakistan responded with drone attacks and disinformation (as an aside, this may well point to the emerging contours of modern warfare ). India countered again, targeting military installations in Pakistan, which launched a second wave of drones and missiles. But India’s air defence system proved near impregnable ; India, it also emerged later, jammed the Chinese air defence system being used by Pakistan during its strikes between May 7 and May 10. Then, in their last wave of attack, Indian jets targeted Pakistani military facilities including air bases, wreaking significant damage. Soon after, the same day, Pakistan’s Director General of Military Operations called his Indian counterpart over a hotline for a cessation of hostilities. It has been a week since, and we are now in a phase that India describes as the “new normal”, one where India responds conventionally to sub-conventional attacks; the Indus Waters Treaty stays suspended ; and the only open issues between the two countries are terrorism and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir . | | Timing it right The release of the death data wasn’t the only instance of peculiar timing in the past fortnight. The Presidential Reference sent by the government to the Supreme Court, seeking answers to 14 questions arising from the court’s April 8 judgement setting timelines for governors and the President to deal with bills passed by state assemblies, was another. It was a given that there would be a Presidential Reference, and the government’s law officers and other stakeholders in government, have been at it since April 12, when the copy of the April 8 judgement was made available . There’s no question that the April 8 judgement strengthened federalism, but most people (this writer included) also believe it over-reached by not limiting itself to Raj Bhavans and going right up to Rashtrapati Bhavan. The peculiar timing was simply the fact that the reference has coincided with a new Chief Justice of India taking over. Apart from the rarity aspect – this is only the 15th Presidential Reference ever – the reference raises key juridical questions. As my colleague Utkarsh Anand wrote in an analysis , “this episode reflects India’s evolving constitutional democracy grappling with complex federal dynamics, judicial activism, and executive accountability”. | | On Supreme Court judges BR Gavai, who took office this week as the 52nd Chief Justice of India, is only the second person from a scheduled caste background to rise to the top judicial post in the country. “It’s the story of a boy who was told the sky’s the limit, and who now sits under its full expanse, not as a symbol, but as a sentinel of justice,” justice Gavai said, as reported by Hindustan Times . But how representative is India’s judiciary? And is there any substance to whispers of nepotism that continue to plague appointments to constitutional courts? My colleague Nishant Ranjan answered this question in a way he has made his own, by building a database. Over the years, Nishant has built databases of chief ministers, the Union council of ministers, and deputy chief ministers. That may sound easy – but it isn’t. The data needs to be collated, verified, and then double-verified. Nishant built a database of Supreme Court judges (not just chief justices) that looked at parameters such as familial relationships, backgrounds, and caste. The result was a three-part series. In the first part of the series, he looked at the links between India’s Supreme Court judges (32, or 16 pairs of 279 Supreme Court judges are related). In the second, he looked at the skew in the backgrounds (including caste) of the judges. And in the third, he analysed whether the move to a collegium system in the early 1990s had changed anything. | | Who’s backward, who’s not? Nishant, and the team he works in, headed by my colleague Roshan Kishore, help answer many questions that I pose, including ones that may, at first sight, appear philosophical. For instance, when the Union government announced a caste census, Roshan and I discussed how many conventional measures of backwardness no longer make sense. “Who’s really backward? And who is not?”, I asked at some point in that discussion. Roshan and Abhishek (also referred to in the first section above) answered it in a two-part series. In the first part, they used three proxy metrics to track the lack of economic affluence. And in the second, they used other proxies to link affluence and caste . | | R&R I’ve discovered that as I’ve grown older, it has become more difficult for me to finish a book in one sitting. I am referring to fiction; it was always difficult for me to finish non-fiction books in one sitting. I did one, though, recently – Callan Wink’s Beartooth . It’s a dark tale of two brothers getting by in rural Montana, but it reminded me less of Jim Harisson, and more of Thomas Hardy. Nature has its way in this book – which is too short, and, at least in parts, far too frenetic – but the humans don’t come off badly. I’ve been listening to the new Little Feat album, Strike Up The Band and wondering how it sounds the same as some of the band’s best work – 1978’s Waiting for Columbus and 1973’s Dixie Chicken – despite the presence of only three of the six members from the band’s classic line-up. Then, maybe it’s not the band; maybe it’s me. | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. All Rights Reserved | | | | |
