(MENAFN- Live Mint) The government at Centre on Saturday rejected an international study which claimed 11.9 lakh excess deaths took place in India in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and said that the claims made are inconsistent and unexplainable.
The estimate is about eight times higher than the official Covid-19 death in India, and 1.5 times the World health Organization's estimates, said researchers, including those from the University of Oxford, reported PTI.
The study published in the journal Science Advances said that the patterns contrast with those seen in high-income countries, where excess deaths were higher among men than women during the pandemic.
However, in a statement, the Health Ministry said that the excess mortality reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate.
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The ministry said that the paper published is methodologically flawed and shows results that are untenable and unacceptable.
“The all-cause excess mortality in 2020 compared with the previous year in India is markedly less than the 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper. Discrepancies between the study's findings and established Covid-19 mortality patterns further undermine its credibility,” said the Health Ministry.
The government also said that the study fails to acknowledge India's robust Civil Registration System (CRS), which recorded a substantial increase in death registrations (over 99%) in 2020, not solely attributable to the pandemic.
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Speaking to ANI, NITI Aayog Member (Health) Dr VK Paul said that the study used data that was being collected by the National Family Health Survey.
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"It is based on the data which was collected in the year 2021 in which household survey includes information on deaths. That data has been used to conclude the report. Now, the problem with this approach is that this survey was going on during the COVID-19 pandemic , but that phase covered only 14 states and UTs. It was not reflective of the entire nation. Also, only part of the households that were covered in these 14 states and UTs were utilised for the reference... Then they applied it all across the nation..."
CMR DG Dr Rajiv Bahl says
ICMR DG Dr Rajiv Bahl said that we always should look at the highest quality data that we can access. "There are two sources of high-quality data in India. One is our Civil Registration System. People erroneously still believe that our system is grossly incomplete. This is not true... The civil registration system is extremely robust now at 291 thousand units which report births and deaths... Our coverage of reported deaths today is over 99%. So clearly when you have data from 99% of deaths, it is not right to look at other sources," Bahl told ANI.
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