Lancet report on India’s alleged excess deaths due to COVID-19 faulty: Government
The HinduA study published in an international journal claiming COVID-19 mortality in India is higher than official counts is speculative and misinformed said the Health Ministry on Friday in a statement issued by it. The Lancet reported recently that excess mortality rates due to COVID-19 among the Indian States are not the highest in the world, because of India’s large population, but the country accounted for around over 20% of global excess deaths as of December 31, 2021. The Ministry explained that for States where Civil Registration System was available, reported deaths during the pandemic has been compared with average reported deaths for the same period in the year 2018 and 2019 which doesn’t take into account multiple pandemic management efforts including lockdown, containment zones, testing and contact tracing, wider dissemination and implementation of clinical management protocols and world’s largest vaccination drive, which form the foundation of pandemic management in the country. The Ministry further adds that the authors of the article have themselves admitted that ‘direct measurement would be preferable to modelled excess mortality estimates not based on all-cause mortality data, which are usually more robust, from the locations themselves.’ Further they have mentioned that ‘as studies from a few selected countries including the Netherlands and Sweden have suggested, we suspect most of the excess mortality during the pandemic is from COVID-19.