NEW DELHI, May 6 — India has objected to a World Health Organization (WHO) report that shows the country’s COVID-19 death toll is more than 10 times the official figure.
The WHO report said on Thursday that the pandemic killed an estimated 4.7 million people in India until 2021-end, a figure the Indian government dismissed as based on wrong projections.
The WHO estimates that the full death toll worldwide associated directly or indirectly with the COVID-19 pandemic between January 2020 and December 2021 was approximately 14.9 million, three times the official reported figures.
Most of the excess deaths are concentrated in South and East Asia, Europe, and the Americas, while some 68 per cent of excess deaths are in just 10 countries globally, the WHO said.
India, which suffered a devastating second COVID-19 wave in 2021, accounted for a big share of the unaccounted deaths in 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,” the WHO explained.
It said excess mortality includes deaths associated with COVID-19 directly from sickness or indirectly as a result of the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society.
“These new estimates use the best available data and have been produced using a robust methodology and a completely transparent approach,” said Samira Asma, assistant director-general for data, analytics and delivery at the WHO.
However, the Indian government raised objections to the methodology used by the WHO to project excess mortality estimates.
“Despite India’s objection to the process, methodology and outcome of this modelling exercise, WHO has released the excess mortality estimates without adequately addressing India’s concerns,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement on Thursday.
“India has consistently questioned WHO’s own admission that data in respect of seventeen Indian states was obtained from some websites and media reports and was used in their mathematical model. This reflects a statistically unsound and scientifically questionable methodology of data collection for making excess mortality projections in case of India,” the ministry said.
The country has so far reported about 524,000 deaths due to the pandemic. Before the latest WHO report, other international estimates also suggested that India’s COVID-19 death count was vastly underreported.
A study published by the health journal Lancet recently put COVID-19 deaths at 18.2 million until the end of 2021 while the official number was about 5.9 million.
The estimated Indian death toll in the journal’s study was more than four million, a number the Indian Healthy Ministry called “speculative” in a statement on March 11.
