With the Covid-19 pandemic currently in decline in India and repeated messaging from the government that the country seems to have seen lower mortality from Covid-19 compared to other countries, it might be time to examine how Covid-19 stacked up against other deadly infectious diseases in India.
By the end of 2020, India officially had just over 1 crore laboratory-confirmed cases of Covid-19, nearly twice as many as cases of typhoid, tuberculosis, malaria and pneumonia in 2018 put together, according to government data. Further, there were more Covid-19 infections in India in 2020 than from most other communicable diseases in a normal year, our analysis of the Global Burden of Disease estimates showed. While India seems to have seen lower Covid-19 mortality, deaths from the disease in India dwarfed those from other infectious diseases.
However, the true number of infections – including asymptomatic cases – was likely much higher, according to two government national…