PremiumCovid-19 deaths in India: 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 required sensitivity, Centre said
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The Central government has rejected the latest report by an acclaimed medical journal, The Lancet, which said that the Covid-19 mortality rate of India is much higher than the official data.
The Centre has called The Lancet's report "speculative and misinformed", and said the authors had themselves admitted to several methodology flaws and inconsistencies.
The report published by one of the world's oldest medical journals claimed that India's estimated cumulative excess Covid deaths between January 2020 and December 2021 were around eight times higher than reported.
It said the Covid mortality rate among Indian states is not the highest in the world, because of India's large population, but the country accounted for around 22·3% of global excess deaths as of December 31, 2021.
Although reported deaths in that period totalled 5·94 million worldwide, The Lancet paper estimates that 18·2 million people died worldwide because of the pandemic, as measured by excess mortality, over that period. This is around three times higher than previously estimated.
The documented deaths due to Covid in India over that period stood at around 4,89,000, the journal says in the paper “Estimating excess mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic: a systematic analysis of Covid-19-related mortality, 2020-21".
Excess mortality measures the additional deaths in a given time compared to the number usually expected and is not dependent on how Covid-19 deaths are recorded.
However, the Union Health Ministry said The Lancet report has used different methodologies for different countries to study data. For India, for example, data sources used by the study appear to have been taken from newspaper reports and non-peer-reviewed studies, it said.
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 required sensitivity, the ministry added.
"This type of speculative reporting has potential to create panic in the community, can misguide people, and should be avoided," it said.
Last month, too, India dismissed previous reports of alleged under-reporting of Covid-19 deaths in the country, with the Health Ministry asserting that it has a robust mechanism in place.
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