Government Rebuts Covid Mortality Study, Citing 'Severe Methodological Issues

India's government refutes a study claiming significantly higher Covid-19 deaths than officially reported. The Ministry of Health criticizes the study's methodology, citing its own data sources and arguing that excess deaths cannot all be attributed to the pandemic.

The Indian government has firmly denied a new study in Science Advances that suggested that India was undercounting its Covid-19 deaths by an alarming degree. The study by the researchers of Indian origin from Oxford University said that India should have 1. The grim Covid-19 toll was even higher – 19 million excess deaths in 2020 compared to the previous year, which was eight times the deaths officially attributed to Covid-19.

The findings were promptly disregarded by India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), which termed them as a ‘gross and misleading overestimate’ based on ‘untenable and unacceptable’ methodology. The ministry relied on data from the Indian Civil Registration System – CR – which shows that deaths raised by 474,000 in 2020, comparing with 2019, and the same pattern was seen in the previous year.

The government also pointed out that not all deaths that occurred beyond the norm can be blamed on the coronavirus outbreak and that the increase may also be due to better reporting of deaths and growth in the population. Even according to the official data, the mortality rate of coronavirus in India is approximately 530 thousand people.

In response, the MoHFW criticized the study for its flawed methodology, arguing that its data were based only on a survey of 23% of households in 14 states during a specific period of time. The ministry has claimed that this sample was not valid enough to represent the entire country.

Challenging the findings to the study, the government stated that based on the data from India’s Sample Registration System (SRS), which is a much bigger sample size across all the states and union territories. SRS confirmed that in 2020, India had very little or no more deaths than it had in 2019, contrary to the reduction in life expectancy.

The ministry also argued that the study exaggerated the mortality of females when actually research conducted reveals that men and the elderly are more likely to die from Covid-19.

Also Read: President Biden Tests Positive for COVID-19, Scrubs Campaign Rally

This just goes to show that as the debate rages on, it is not easy to come up with the actual impact of the pandemic on a country like India, which is very large and diverse.