Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.
The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US.
FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?
> More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.
> Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven times higher than reported officially". A paper in The Lancet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research centre, uses subnational all-cause mortality data from 12 Indian states. They come close to the WHO's estimation.
I'm aware of that, which is why I made the point that it would only bring India's Covid death rate to around the same as the US and other Western countries. It is also of no help to the discussion around my original point, which is the idea that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who died unexpectedly of Covid.
FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?