HT maintained its own database of confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries collated from bulletins issued by different states and union territories. As states gradually stopped publishing these bulletins, HT used data from the health ministry to log daily changes.

HT stopped maintaining this database on January 31, 2023, when the rolling seven-day average of Covid-19 deaths had been in the single digits for over 100 days, and somewhere between zero and two for over a month.

The total Covid-19 deaths logged until January 31, 2023, according to HT’s database, was 532,018, or over half a million people. Of these, 149,036 occurred in 2020; 332,510 in 2021, during the deadly second wave; 50,435 in 2022, during the relatively benign third wave; and 37 in the first month of 2023. (See Chart 1)

To be sure, some deaths continued to occur through 2023. The health ministry added 2,651 Covid-19 deaths to its tally for that year, and recorded another 304 deaths from January 1, 2024 to February 24, 2025. This brings the official toll, according to the central government, to 533,662.

How close do official numbers come to the truth?

There is reason to dispute these figures. This is not because of any coordinated conspiracy to undercount the dead, but because of expected factors resulting from the structural weaknesses of our healthcare systems.

Even in a normal year, not all deaths are registered. For example, only 92% of estimated deaths were registered in 2019, the last year for which this number was published in the Civil Registration System report. Medical certification of deaths is even rarer, and were available for only 20.7% of registered deaths in 2019. Even with a concerted effort to log every Covid-19 death, the truth is we will never know its true toll.

There have been multiple attempts to estimate this figure. A global modelled estimate of undercounting produced by the World Health Organization (WHO), for example, indicated that India recorded more than 4.7 million more deaths than usual across 2020 and 2021. This figure is almost 10 times the official tally of 481,546 for those two years.

On the other hand, the Health Management Information System of the National Health Mission, which gathers data from across 200,000 health facilities in rural areas, showed that there were about 436,000 to 472,000 excess deaths just in April-May 2021, when compared with corresponding figures for 2018 and 2019.

This was 2.6 to 2.8 times the official toll of 168,959 — nationwide — in those two months of 2021, during the deadly second wave.

Livelihoods

Saving lives during the pandemic sometimes meant lockdowns, which translated, for so many, into a loss of livelihood.

Except for the April-June quarter of 2020, the unemployment rate continued its downward trajectory. But this is because unpaid work (think, family labour on a subsistence farm) is counted as employment in India.

The loss of livelihoods is, therefore, better captured in data on the qualitative deterioration of jobs. While the proportion of unemployed in the labour force has decreased, the proportion of unpaid people in the labour force has shot up. This is largely because of a sharp rise in the share of unpaid family workers in the labour force since the pandemic, particularly in agriculture. (See Chart 2)

To be sure, the quality of jobs is now starting to move back towards pre-pandemic levels. In the last six months of 2024, the proportion of unpaid family workers decreased and that of regular wage workers (the highest paid among different categories in the Periodic Labour Force Survey) increased in the urban workforce compared to the year before.

While one would have to wait for data on rural areas to emerge, in order to get a fuller picture, the urban data suggests that something of a reversal has begun.

Learning

Lockdowns and bad jobs for adults also affected children’s education.

The proportion of rural children not enrolled in school shot up among younger age groups, where this number is usually low. The qualitative deterioration was more widespread. Basic reading skills decreased across different levels, and students shifted from private schools to government ones across age groups. “Covid-caused financial distress” was the most commonly cited reason for this shift. (See Chart 3)

As with jobs, however, something of a reversal has begun here too. Students are returning to private schools and basic reading are skills back to pre-pandemic levels, surveys are showing.

While these numbers, on lives, livelihoods and learning, capture some of the greatest losses caused by the pandemic, we cannot yet expect to see the complete picture. There are some losses from which we will never recover; and some losses that simply cannot be quantified.

(abhishek.jha@htlive.com)