Responding to media reports taking stock of the extent of COVID-19 deaths in the country, the Union government on Saturday criticised the articles and even called one, “speculative without any basis and seem to be misinformed.” The Union government was referring to an article titled ‘Just How Big Could India’s True Covid Toll Be?’ which appeared in The New York Times.A study on insurance claims suggesting over 8,000 COVID-19 deaths went unreported in Telangana, that was mentioned in the Economist and was also reported by The News Minute was also called into question.
The New York Times article said that India has suffered perhaps five to seven times more deaths than the official number of reported COVID-19 fatalities. A press release from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare called it a speculative article, which is without any basis and misinformed. “The unsound analysis of the said article is based on the extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence. Studies that are used by the magazine as an estimate of excess mortality are not validated tools for determining the mortality rate of any country or region,” claimed the Ministry.
It went on to say that the evidence cited by the magazine is a study supposedly done by Christopher Laffler of Virginia Commonwealth University. And that an internet search of research studies in scientific databases such as Pubmed, Research Gate, etc., did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine, according to the government.
Referring to the article published in The News Minute, the Union government said that a piece of evidence given is the study done in Telangana based on insurance claims. Again, there is no peer-reviewed scientific data available on such a study, said the government.
An article published in the Economist, titled ‘More evidence emerges of India’s true death toll from covid-19’ was also rubbished. The article had relied on two studies done by Psephology groups namely ‘Prashnam’ and ‘C-Voter’ who conduct, predict and analyse poll results. The Union government claimed that these groups were never associated with public health research.
“Even in their own area of work of psephology, their methodologies for predicting poll results have been wide off the mark many times. By their own submission, the magazine states that ‘such estimates have been extrapolated from patchy and often unreliable local government data, from company records and from analyses of such things as obituaries’,” said the press statement referring to the article.
The Union government claimed in its press statement to have been transparent in its approach to COVID-19 data management. It said that as early as May 2020, to avoid inconsistency in the number of deaths being reported, the Indian Council of Medical Research had issued ‘Guidance for the appropriate recording of COVID-19 related deaths in India’ for correct recording of all deaths as per ICD-10 codes recommended by WHO for mortality coding. And that “states and UTs have been urged through formal communications, multiple video conferences and through the deployment of Central teams for correct recording of deaths in accordance with laid down guidelines.”
The Union Health Ministry also claimed to have regularly emphasised the need for a robust reporting mechanism for monitoring district-wise cases and deaths on a daily basis. And that states consistently reporting a lower number of daily deaths were supposedly told to re-check their data. In the press statement, it is pointed out that the Union Government wrote to the State of Bihar to provide detailed data and a district-wise break-up of the reconciled number of deaths to the Union Health Ministry.
“It’s a well-known fact that there shall always be differences in mortality recorded during a profound and prolonged public health crisis such as COVID pandemic and well-conducted research studies on excess mortalities, usually done after the event when data on mortalities are available from reliable sources. The methodologies for such studies are well established, the data sources are defined as also the valid assumptions for computing mortality,” the press statement said.
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