The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
RECENTLY, as India’s battle against Covid-19 raged on, the New York Times published a damning report regarding the death and disease statistics that India was offering up as ‘official’ figures. According to the NYT article, various statistical models revealed that the Indian government was vastly undercounting the numbers of the dead and diseased. Official Indian figures had listed 26.9 million cases and 307, 231 deaths. Using their models, NYT statisticians said that even based on conservative estimations the actual number of cases was likely to be 404.2m cases and 600,000 deaths.
A more likely scenario (based on the premise that for every reported case there were 20 that were unreported and that the fatality rate was 0.3 per cent) was that there were 539m cases in India and that 1.6m people had died. Finally, the worst-case scenario (based on the premise that every reported case meant 26 unreported cases and a fatality rate of 0.6pc) suggested that a whopping 700.7m cases of Covid-19 infection and 4.2m deaths.