India became the third country in the world to report over 400,000 Covid-19 deaths after US and Brazil. Apart from these, Mexico is the only other country to have registered more than 200,000 deaths. There are ten countries where more than 100,000 people have succumbed to Covid or related complications. With 600,000 deaths, US is at the top of this list and is followed by Brazil (520,000), India (400,000), Mexico (230,000) and Peru with 190,000 deaths. The others with five figure death tolls are Russia, UK, Italy, France and Colombia.
Among these countries, India’s deaths per million population is by far the lowest at 287. It’s 916 in Russia and between 1,000 and 2,000 for France, Mexico, the US, and UK. Among these countries, the ratio is highest for Peru, which has seen 5,765 deaths for every million of its population.
For Colombia, Italy and Brazil, the other three countries that have seen over a 100,000 deaths so far, the death per million ratio is over 2,000 but less than 3,000. India’s case fatality rate (deaths per 100 infections) is 1.3, which again is the lowest among these countries.
When compared to other large Asian countries (both economy and population) and its neighbourhood, however, India’s death per million ratio is among the highest. Except for Nepal, which has seen 308 deaths per million of its population, most of these countries have a lower ratio than India. The Philippines and Indonesia are the only other countries where this ratio exceeded 200.
The ratio is 160 for Malaysia, 143 for Sri Lanka and 122 for Afghanistan. It is less than 100 for Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand. In case of fatality rate, India is better than most of these countries, but Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia have even lower CFR.
The latest data from Johns Hopkins University’s Covid dashboard and UN population estimates for 2021 shows that among 121 countries with a population of more than 5 million, there are 54 that have reported higher deaths per million as compared to India. The ratio is lower than India for 66 of these countries.
