Lex van Geen - March 17, 2021

Lex van Geen, PhD, Lamont Research Professor, Geochemistry Division, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Comparison of 2019 and 2020 mortality in rural Bangladesh in relation to COVID-19: An update based on a second round 12,000 phone calls

The study presented by Dr. Geen on COVID-19-related mortality in rural Bangladeshbegan as a large-scale study of strategies to mitigate arsenic exposure from well water. Implementation of this study began in 2019 with a complete in-person census of over 70,000 individuals distributed across 132 villages northeast of Dhaka, Bangladesh. With the start of the pandemic, Dr. Geen and collaborators have used follow-up censuses by phone in order to track excess mortality due to COVID-19. Based on public government data from the countries, COVID-19 death rates have appeared far higher in the US and Europe compared to south Asian countries like India and Bangladesh, a discrepancy that has recently been noted in national media. Using the high-resolution rural census data, Dr. Geen aims to uncover the roots of this discrepancy—is the mortality rate from COVID-19 genuinely lower in Bangladesh, or is this apparent difference a function of inadequate reporting? The census data has shown that despite thousands of cases of COVID-19 in the area, there was no detectable increase in mortality in the studied population from 2019 to 2020. Otherwise, rates of mortality measured through the census matched previously reported rates for rural Bangladesh and the country as a whole. Dr. Geen’s work suggests that despite documented inadequacies in official reporting, the mortality rate due to COVID-19 has been genuinely lower in this population.