[russellw]

Looking at India again.

The global mortality rate is currently sitting at a fraction over 2% but that's being kept down by the Asian figure of 1.3% and India makes up more than half those cases but only 43% of the deaths.

Oceania is the next lowest (1.9%) but as it's mostly made up of islands, their ability to contain spread and have manageable case loads has helped keep it a little below the global average.

Europe and North America are pretty line-ball at 2.2% although we know Russia has been under-reporting deaths but even adding in 100k more only raises that to 2.5%.

Africa and South America are the highest at around 2.7% and I think that is probably an accurate reflection of their health systems and some spikes in case numbers but it's also probably at least where India should be.

So, if we look at India as being 2.7% rather than the current 1.087%, that's going to add something like 370k more deaths to their total and take the Asian percentage to a more realistic 2.1% and even that might well be understating it.

Case numbers have started to fall in India but the 10 day average is still a little over 380k/day and there might well be an increase coming for mortalities as we know there is a 10-14 day lag between infection and death and the 3.5-4k deaths currently being reported is (sadly) nowhere near enough when 10 days ago case averages were 360k/day which should now translate to something between 7k (2%) and 9k (2.7%) per day.

Like Russia, we'll never know the real numbers. It will take India two years to even provide 'all causes' mortality numbers but at least we should be able to extrapolate ball park real numbers based on the delta between a 'normal' year and 2021.

Having said that, the 'official' mortality numbers peaked last Friday with a little over 4k deaths reported but because they only record deaths for those who had been previously diagnosed, that's clearly not going to include them all.