India has “substantially greater” COVID-19 deaths than official reports suggest—close to 3 million, which is more than six times higher than the government has acknowledged and the largest number of any country. The finding could prompt scrutiny of other countries with anomalously low death rates.

Summary

India, from the earliest days of the pandemic, has reported far fewer COVID-19 deaths than expected given the toll elsewhere—an apparent death “paradox” that some believed was real and others thought would prove illusory.
That’s 340 COVID-19 deaths per million—about one-seventh the per capita COVID-19 mortality tallied in the United States.
“The Indian government very much is trying to suppress the numbers in the way that they coded the COVID deaths,” Jha says.
He adds that almost every country undercounts COVID-19 mortality.
Russia had 4.5 times more deaths than normal, far beyond its official COVID-19 tally, and the trend has continued, the researchers recently tweeted.