Centre dismisses report claiming Covid-19 mortality in India higher than official count

The Government of India on Friday dismissed a recently published article in a "reputed international journal" that provided estimates of all-cause excess mortality for several countries based on a mathematical modelling exercise and said that the report is "speculative" and "misinformed."

Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in a statement issued today said that the study has concluded that although reported Covid-19 deaths between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, totalled 5.94 million worldwide, an estimated 18.2 million people died worldwide because of the Covid-19 pandemic (as measured by excess mortality) over that period.

"Mathematical modelling techniques are essentially a process of creating a mathematical representation of a real-world scenario to make a prediction. Such predictions are founded on a certain set of inputs either based on real-world scenarios or approximations of those (which may vary in accuracy according to the technique used) inputs that are not available," stated the ministry.

It further said, "Often these studies involve, taking a relatively small actual sample and extrapolating the result to the entire population. While this may achieve near accurate results for a small homogenous country/region, such techniques have failed repeatedly to give reliable results for a large, diverse population."

According to the ministry, the study takes into account different methodologies for different countries and India, for example, data sources used by this study appear to have been taken from newspaper reports and non-peer-reviewed studies. This model uses data of all-cause excess mortality (created by another non-peer-reviewed model) as an input and this raises serious concerns about the accuracy of the results of this statistical exercise, the ministry said. 

It stated that the reporting of deaths is regularly done transparently and is daily updated in the public domain on the website of the Union Ministry of Health. 

It is highlighted that quoting issues as sensitive as death, that too during an ongoing global public health crisis like pandemic Covid-19, should be dealt with facts and with the required sensitivity, said the ministry, adding that this type of speculative reporting has the potential to create panic in the community, can misguide people and should be avoided.