Govt slams report as WHO says India's Covid toll is 47,00,000

Wednesday 11th May 2022 08:04 EDT
 
 

India and the World Health Organization are at loggerheads over the latter’s new estimates of 47,00,000 excess deaths in the country due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 - an assessment that has been strongly contested by the government which cited flawed methodology, inaccurate sourcing of data, inconsistencies in criteria and use of assumption by the UN health agency for projections.
WHO estimates are nearly 10 times higher than the country’s official count of 484,000 Covid-19 fatalities in these two years. Globally, more than twice as many people have died as a result of Covid-19 as the official data shows, according to a new WHO report which pegged 14. 9 million excess deaths associated with Covid-19 by the end of 2021. The numbers reported by countries added up to 6 million.

In a firm criticism of the WHO report, the government raised concerns over use of mathematical models by the UN agency despite availability of authentic data. It has also raised concerns over sourcing of data, selection of states for extrapolation and lack of transparency by the UN agency. The government said WHO has released the excess mortality estimates without adequately addressing India’s concerns and despite India’s objection to the process, methodology and outcome of this modelling exercise.

“India had informed WHO that in view of the availability of authentic data published through Civil Registration System (CRS) by Registrar General of India (RGI), mathematical models should not be used for projecting excess mortality numbers for India,” the government said. The world health body has calculated excess mortality as the difference between deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of the pandemic, based on data from earlier years.


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