Covid-19 hit women harder than men in India, unlike most of the world
A new analysis of deaths during the covid-19 pandemic estimates that women and those in certain minority groups experienced the greatest declines in life expectancy
By Grace Wade
19 July 2024
New Delhi, India, in March 2020, during a curfew imposed as a preventive measure against covid-19
Yawar Nazir/Getty Images
The covid-19 pandemic may have impacted India more severely than previously estimated, with the life expectancy of women, certain social groups and younger demographics experiencing the most severe declines.
Previous mortality estimates during the covid-19 pandemic in India relied on official death records. Yet lockdowns disrupted this system, which already underreported deaths in women and children even before the pandemic. It doesn’t collect certain information like caste or ethnicity either, says Sangita Vyas at Hunter College in New York.
So Vyas and her colleagues gathered information on deaths in India from the National Family Health Survey. This country-wide survey asks participants whether anyone in their household died in the past four years and if so, to provide data like the person’s date of death, age and gender – only including options for men and women.
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The researchers analysed data from more than 765,000 participants who completed the survey in 2021. They found that deaths in 2020 were about 17 per cent higher than in 2019. If similar increases occurred across the country, that indicates almost 1.2 million excess deaths in 2020 – eight times the official number of covid-19 deaths in India in 2020 and 1.5 times the World Health Organization’s estimates, according to the study.
Between 2019 and 2020, overall life expectancy at birth declined by more than 2.5 years in the sample, compared with a 1.5-year decline in the US during the same period. Life expectancy changes differed by gender, age and social group, too.
