Media reports on COVID-19 deaths not accurate: Union Ministry

New Delhi: The Union government has refuted media reports dealing with COVID-19 deaths in the country as baseless and speculative. In a press statement, cited by The News Minute, the government described the reports as a failure to deliver true scientific data.

The New York Times (NYT) magazine had carried on an article titled 'Just How Big Could India's True Covid Toll Be?' while news portals 'The News Minute' and 'The Economist' had reported a story based on a study on insurance claims for over 8,000 Covid-19 deaths which went unrecorded in Telangana and the other one based on a study by psephology groups, respectively.

India might have missed out on five to seven times more deaths than the official number of reported Covid-19 fatalities, NYT had alleged.

Denying the allegations, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that the article was "based on the extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence". The Ministry further added that the magazine did not use "validated tools" for finding out the mortality rate of any country or region.

Scientific databases such as Pubmed, ResearchGate did not cite the study, which was supposedly done by Christopher Laffler of Virginia Commonwealth University, and that the magazine did not provide a detailed methodology, the government pointed out.

Meanwhile, the article published in the Economist, titled 'More evidence emerges of India's true death toll from covid-19' based on two studies, researched by Psephology groups, Prashnam and C-Voter, was also slammed as unreliable.

"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 analyses of such things as obituaries'," the Union government said, adding that these groups were never associated with public health research.

While citing The News Minute's report, the government claimed that the data was based on insurance claims in Telangana, which did not have any peer-reviewed scientific data.

The Indian government has been transparent in Covid-19 data management. The Indian Council of Medical Research had issued 'Guidance for the appropriate recording of COVID-19 related deaths in India' for accurate data recording of all deaths as per ICD-10 codes recommended by WHO for mortality coding to avoid disparities in the number of deaths being reported. Furthermore, the statement said 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."

There will always be variances in mortality recorded during a profound and prolonged public health crisis such as the COVID pandemic and research studies on excess mortalities are usually done after the event when data on mortalities are available from reliable sources, Union government said. The News minute cited the statement as saying, "the methodologies for such studies are well established, the data sources are defined as also the valid assumptions for computing mortality."