Centre rejects study that claims 11.9 lakh excess deaths during pandemic

The Centre cites a rising trend of death registration and a larger population base in the following year.PTI

The report, published in the academic journal Science Advances, is ‘gross and misleading’; the study fails to acknowledge India’s robust Civil Registration System, says Union Health Ministry

THE HINDU BUREAU

 

NEW DELHI

The Union Health Ministry on Saturday dismissed a study reporting a higher number of deaths in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in India.

In a statement, the Ministry said the study, published in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was based on untenable and unacceptable estimates.

“It is strongly asserted that an excess mortality of about 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate. It is noteworthy that excess mortality during the pandemic means an increase in deaths due to all causes, and cannot be equated with deaths that were directly caused by COVID-19,” the Ministry said.

The paper said excess mortality was greater in women and in the younger age groups (particularly 0-19). The Ministry, however, said data on about 5.3 lakh recorded deaths due to the novel coronavirus, as well as research data from cohorts and registries, consistently showed higher mortality due to the virus in men than women (2:1) and in older age groups (several fold higher in persons above 60 than in the 0-15 age group). The inconsistent and unexplainable results in the published paper further reduced any confidence in its claims.

“The study is erroneous and the methodology followed by the authors has critical flaws; the claims are inconsistent and unexplainable. The all-cause excess mortality in 2020 compared with the previous year in India is markedly fewer than the 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper,’’ it said.

While the authors claim to follow standard methodology of analysing the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5), there are critical flaws in methodology, it said. The most important flaw is that the authors have taken a subset of households included in the NFHS-5 survey between January and April 2021, compared mortality in these households in 2020 with 2019, and extrapolated the results to the entire country, it said.

“The NFHS sample is representative of the country only when it is considered as a whole. The 23% of households included in this analysis from parts of 14 States cannot be considered representative of the country,” the Ministry said.

The paper erroneously argues for the need for such analyses claiming that the vital registration system in low and middle income countries including India is weak, it said. But the Civil Registration System in India is highly robust and captures over 99% of deaths. This reporting has constantly increased from 75% in 2015 to over 99% in 2020, it said.

Data from this system shows death registration has increased by 4.74 lakh in 2020 from 2019. There was a similar increase of 4.86 lakh and 6.9 lakh in death registration in 2018 and 2019 over the respective previous years. Notably, all excess deaths in a year in the CRS are not attributable to the pandemic. Excess number is also due to an increasing trend of death registration in CRS (it was 92% in 2019) and a larger population base in the succeeding year.

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