New Delhi: On Saturday, the Union government denied accusations of excess mortality in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing a report by Oxford University researchers of Indian descent published in the scholarly journal Science Advances in the United States. They called the study a “gross and misleading overestimate.”
According to the study, the number of deaths in India increased by 17%, or 1.19 million, in 2020 compared to the previous year. This figure is 1.5 times greater than predictions from the World Health Organization and eight times more than the country’s official count of Covid deaths.
The results “are predicated on unacceptable and untenable estimates.”
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) declared, “The paper published today is methodologically flawed and shows untenable and unacceptable results.”
According to the ministry, deaths in India “increased by 4.74 lakh in the year 2020 compared to 2019,” releasing data derived from the country’s “very robust” Civil Registration System (CRS), a nationwide platform for recording births and deaths.
“There was a similar increase of 4.86 lakh and 6.90 lakh in death registration in the year 2018 and 2019 over the respective previous years,” it added.
It was mentioned that extra deaths from all sources may be included and are not necessarily related to the pandemic.
The MoHFW stated that “about 5.3 lakh deaths due to COVID-19” were reported in India and that “an increasing trend of death registration in CRS (it was 92% in 2019) and a larger population base in the succeeding year” are also to blame for the increase.
Further, the ministry slammed the authors’ claim to follow the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) standard analysis methodology.
“There are critical flaws in methodology,” as the study is based only on 23 per cent of households from part of 14 states from the NFHS survey between January and April 2021.
“It cannot be considered representative of the country”, it said that the “nature of the estimates is erroneous.”
Citing data from the Indian government’s Sample Registration System (SRS), which covers approximately 24 lakh households in 8,842 sample units spread across 36 States/UTs, the ministry reported that there was “no reduction in life expectancy and very little if any, excess mortality in 2020 compared with 2019 data (crude death rate 6.0/1000 in 2020, crude death rate 6.0/1000 in 2019).”
Furthermore, the MoHFW stated that “research data from cohorts and registries consistently shows higher mortality due to Covid-19 in males than females (2:1) and in older age groups (several-fold higher in > 60 years olds than in 0-15-year-old children),” refuting the study’s claims of higher female mortality.
