Corona Deaths: Has India done really well?

Some 5829 people have lost their lives due to COVID in India. We are now ranked 13th on deaths even though our population is the second highest in the world. Similarly on deaths per million population, India’s rank is 120, way below its population rank.

Let us now look only at countries with 50000 COVID cases are more. There are 20 such countries.

First, let us study what is called Case Fatality Rate. What % of people who have been found to have COVID-19 are dying? India’s Case Fatality Rate was 2.8%. But India was not the lowest. India was 8th lowest. 7 other countries were better than India

Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Chile and Peru

Because India is adding a lot of cases recently, we decided to create a new metric – Death rate amongst closed cases. In this we don’t consider active cases, we only look at those who have recovered and those who died. We have data only for 18 countries. India had 5.5% deaths amongst closed cases and ranked 7th on this. 6 Countries performed better

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Chile and Peru

When we look at the data closely, we noticed one simple fact. All the countries that had a higher death rate than India had a much older population.

When it comes to deaths per million population, India is ranked 7th lowest with 4 deaths per million population. China is ahead (Though its numbers are quite questionable), Pakistan is just behind India with 7 deaths per million population

To Summarise

a. Once a person gets COVID-19, India is an average performer in saving those lives being ranked 8th out of 20. The death rate is low probably because we are a younger population but not the lowest because our healthcare system is not exactly world class.

b. But India has done a very good job in preventing COVID-19 cases in the first place. This is probably due to Stringent Lockdown, reasonably good contact tracing and upgrading testing at a reasonable pace.

Government of India and State Governments have done a good job to prevent Cases in India, they have done an average job when it comes to preventing deaths. With lockdown slowly coming to an end both of these will face the ultimate Test