NEW DELHI: The Centre on Saturday said it has been transparent in Covid data management and has been urging states and Union Territories to maintain robust reporting mechanism for monitoring district wise cases and deaths on a daily basis.
Referring to an article published in Economist which claims that India has suffered “five-to-seven times” excess deaths than the official number, the government said the article — it did not name the publication — in the international magazine is “speculative” and without any basis.
It “seems to be misinformed” as it is relying on estimates that are not validated, non-peer reviewed studies and analysis by psephology groups like “Prashnam” and “C-Voter” that were never associated with public health research, the government said.
“By their own submission, the magazine states that ‘such estimates have been extrapolated from patchy and often unreliable local government data, from company records and from analyses of such things as obituaries’,” the health ministry said in a strongly worded rebuttal.
“The so called ‘evidence’ cited by the magazine is a study supposedly done by Christopher Laffler of Virginia Commonwealth University. An internet search of research studies in scientific database… did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine,” the ministry said.
Raising concerns over “unsound analysis” in the article, the government said it is based on “extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence”. “Studies used by the magazine are not validated tools for determining mortality rate of any country or region,” it said.
View More | Source: Times of India