India objects to World Health Organization’s COVID-19 death toll report 

After a World Health Organization (WHO) report on Thursday stated that Covid-19 led to the death of 4.7 million people in India, the Indian government has questioned the validity of the model used to reach this figure.

The concern specifically includes how the statistical model projects estimates for a country of geographical size and population of India and also fits in with other countries which have a smaller population.

The ministry in a statement in response to a New York Times article titled “India Is Stalling WHO’s Efforts to Make Global COVID Death Toll Public,” said, “India has been in regular and in-depth technical exchange with World Health Organisation (WHO) on the issue. The analysis while uses mortality figures directly obtained from Tier -I set of countries, uses a mathematical modelling process for Tier II countries (which includes India). India’s basic objection has not been with the result (whatever they might have been) but rather the methodology adopted for the same.”

“The concern specifically includes how the statistical model projects estimates for a country of geographical size and population of India and also fits in with other countries which have a smaller populations. Such size fits all approach and models which are true for smaller countries like Tunisia may not be applicable to India with a population of 1.3 billion,” it said adding that the WHO is yet to share the confidence interval for the present statistical model across various countries.

The Ministry said that the model gives two highly different sets of excess mortality estimates when using the data from Tier I countries and when using unverified data from 18 Indian States. “Such wide variation in estimates raises concerns about validity and accuracy of such a modelling exercise,” it added.

According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), there have been 43,094,938 infections and 524,002 Covid-related deaths reported in India since the pandemic began.

The Covid deaths in India include 1,47,843 from Maharashtra, 69,047 from Kerala, 40,101 from Karnataka, 38,025 from Tamil Nadu, 26,175 from Delhi, 23,507 from Uttar Pradesh and 21,201 from West Bengal, reported PTI. The health ministry has said that more than 70 per cent of the deaths occurred due to comorbidities.

In a technical note for India, WHO said the “estimates may not be regarded as the national statistics officially produced by India due to differences arising from the data and methods used by WHO.”

As per the WHO report, excess mortality is calculated as “the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of the pandemic based on data from earlier years.”