New survey estimates are producing Covid-19 fatality rates for India that are lower than virtually anywhere else in the world by orders of magnitude. But the current narrative around these fatality rates could be doing a disservice to India’s understanding of the disease by being too quick to attribute them to the government’s “successful strategies” rather than searching for the underlying biological and sociological causes that could explain them, experts say.
The Indian government frequently reiterates that India’s Covid-19 mortality is particularly low compared to the rest of the world, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has singled out this indicator for