New Delhi, Feb 17 (Agency) The Union Health Ministry on Thursday called the latest study on Covid-19 deaths inaccurate and skewed after it alleged that the Centre under-counted pandemic fatalities. According to the study, the country hid the death toll manifold. It estimated that 32 to 37 lakh people died due to Covid-19 by November last year in the country,as compared to official figures of 4.6 lakh. “Media reports based on a published research paper alleged that mortality due to Covid-19 in India is much higher than the official count and actual numbers have been undercounted,” it said.
The Ministry that these reports were fallacious and inaccurate. “They are not based on facts and are speculative in nature,” it said in a statement. It said that Covid-19 deaths were reported regularly at different levels and in a transparent manner. “India has a robust system of reporting deaths including Covid-19 deaths are compiled regularly at different levels of governance starting from the Gram Panchayat level to the District-level and State level based on globally acceptable categorization,” it said. “The reporting of deaths is regularly done in a transparent manner. All deaths are compiled by the Centre after being independently reported by states,” the Ministry clarified.
The Centre said the data sets used for the estimation of Covid-19 mortality in the research paper were skewed and provided fallacious conclusions. “The study quoted in the media reports has taken four distinct sub-populations — the population of Kerala, Indian Railways employees, MLAs and MPs, and school teachers in Karnataka, and uses triangulation process to estimate nationwide deaths. “Any such projections based on limited data sets and certain specific assumptions must be treated with extreme care before extrapolating the numbers by putting all states and country of the size of India in a single envelope. This exercise runs the risk of mapping skewed data of outliers together and is bound to give wrong estimations thereby leading to fallacious conclusions,” the Centre said.