NEW DELHI, (IANS): Calling it a “gross and
misleading overestimate”, the Union government on Saturday refuted claims of
excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic in India, as stated in a study
led by Indian-origin researchers from Oxford University and published in the
US-based academic journal Science Advances.
The
study showed that India experienced 17 per cent higher or 1.19 million more
deaths in 2020 than the previous year -- eight times higher than the official
number of Covid deaths in India, and 1.5 times higher than the World Health
Organization’s estimates.
The
findings “are based on untenable and unacceptable estimates. The paper
published today is methodologically flawed and shows results that are untenable
and unacceptable,” the Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) said.
Deaths
in India “increased by 4.74 lakh in the year 2020 compared to 2019,” said the
ministry, sharing data based on the “highly robust” Civil Registration System
(CRS) -- a national portal for registering birth and death events.
“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
noted that all excess deaths are not attributable to the pandemic and may
include mortality due to all causes.
The
increase is also due to “an increasing trend of death registration in CRS (it
was 92 per cent in 2019) and a larger population base in the succeeding year,”
the MoHFW said, adding that India recorded “about 5.3 lakh deaths due to
Covid-19.”
Further,
the ministry slammed the authors’ claim to follow the standard methodology of
analysing the National Family Health Survey-5 NFHS-5).
“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
the data from India’s Sample Registration System (SRS) which covers around 84
lakh population in 24 lakh households in 8,842 sample units spread across 36
States/UTs in the country, the ministry noted that India had “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) and no reduction in life
expectancy.”
Moreover,
the MoHFW said that contrary to the study claims of higher female mortality,
“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).”