In Delhi’s hellish summer, heat deaths often not recorded as another cause.
Magnified by vulnerable population, and whiplash between water shortages and sudden flooding. Mosquito diseases like malaria, and diseases of polluted water threaten co-incident health threats.
Similar problem in tracking heat deaths in the US, as I posted elsewhere on this page.
New York Times:
“It’s difficult for us to know how many people are impacted by extreme heat when we look at emergency room data,” said Kelly Turner, a heat expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Many hospitals don’t have a code for heat or extreme heat. If, for instance, what actually happened is someone came in with headaches and pulmonary issues, that’s what’s going to be coded.”
The dire health ramifications of heat have become a subject of intense interest in the Biden administration. At a visit to the District of Columbia’s emergency operations center last week, Mr. Biden unveiled a draft of first-of-their-kind Labor Department regulations that would protect roughly 35 million workers exposed to extreme heat on the job.
“Extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States,” Mr. Biden said at the event. “More people die from extreme heat than floods, hurricanes and tornadoes combined. Say that again: combined.”
Hospitals record ER visits and deaths, and it doesn’t take elaborate statistical analysis to make the correlation between weather and the number of deaths, heart attacks, collapses, etc.
One complication that does arise is that, say, a second major heat wave might not record as many deaths, because (1) the weakest have been culled, and (2) people made plans and changes after the first one. The heat is still deadly, of course, but the context has changed.