A new study that was co-authored by OHT President Ramanan Laxminarayan demonstrated that the implementation of lockdown measures was associated with a seven percent reduction in all-cause excess mortality due to a decrease in deaths caused by injuries, infectious diseases, maternal conditions, and liver disease, but offset by the number of cancer deaths doubling during lockdowns. They also found that the 30 percent increase in all-cause deaths in Madurai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu between March 2020 and July 2021 could be attributed to medically unsupervised deaths. Excess deaths during this time period were concentrated during peaks in COVID-19 transmission. While the 30 percent increase in all-cause deaths in Madurai align with other observations of rising mortalities between 2020 and 2021, this rate significantly exceeds the global average increases of eight percent in 2020 and 18 percent in 2021.

Read the full article, published in Nature Communications, here.