Ritwik Bhaduri

2021 · SSRN

Estimating the infection fatality rate from SARS-CoV-2 in India

Bhramar Mukherjee, Soumik Purkayashtha, Ritoban Kundu, Ritwik Bhaduri, et al.

Journal article

Abstract

There has been much discussion and debate around the underreporting of COVID-19 infections and deaths in India. In this short report we first estimate this underreporting factor for infections from publicly available data released by the Indian Council of Medical Research from national seroprevalence surveys. We then use a rigorous compartmental epidemiologic model to estimate the undetected number of infections and deaths. Both estimates qualitatively show that there is a large degree of 'covert infections' in India, with model-based estimated underreporting factor for infections as 11.11 (95% CI 10.71–11.47) and for deaths as 3.56 (95% CI 3.48–3.64). This implies approximately 91% of infections and 72% of deaths related to COVID-19 remain unreported in India. These estimates enable us to calculate the infection fatality rate (IFR) for India: if we rely on only reported deaths the IFR estimate is 0.13%, while taking underreporting of deaths into account, the IFR estimate is 0.46%. There is considerable variation in these estimates across states.

BibTeX

@misc{mukherjee2021estimating,
  title={Estimating the infection fatality rate from {SARS-CoV-2} in India},
  author={Bhramar Mukherjee and Soumik Purkayashtha and Ritoban Kundu and Ritwik Bhaduri and others},
  year={2021},
  note={Available at SSRN 3798552},
  doi={10.2139/ssrn.3798552},
  abstract={There has been much discussion and debate around the underreporting of COVID-19 infections and deaths in India. We estimate the underreporting factor for infections from national seroprevalence surveys and use a rigorous compartmental epidemiologic model to estimate the undetected number of infections and deaths. Model-based estimated underreporting factor for infections is 11.11 (95% CI 10.71-11.47) and for deaths is 3.56 (95% CI 3.48-3.64), implying approximately 91% of infections and 72% of deaths remain unreported. The infection fatality rate for India is estimated at 0.13% based on reported deaths and 0.46% when accounting for death underreporting.}
}