Digital Desk: On Friday, the Central government countered that the media reports claiming under-counting of Covid-19 deaths are baseless and ill-informed.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare stated that such media reports alleging under-count of actual deaths in India are misleading. However, the media reports have alleged a crucial under-counting of Covid-19 deaths in the last two waves of the pandemic.
"It is presented that such media data is fallacious and ill-informed. They are not based on facts and are misleading. India has a robust birth and death reporting system based on a Statute and is carried out regularly from the Gram Panchayat level to the District level and State level. Moreover, the whole exercise is carried out under the Registrar General of India (RGI) oversight," the Centre stated.
"All Covid-19 deaths are being independently recorded by States and collected centrally. The backlog in COVID-19 mortality data being submitted by the States at different times is being reconciled in Govt of India's data regularly," the Ministry stated.
The Ministry further added that many States have regularly intervened in their Covid-19 death numbers and have registered deaths considerably. Therefore, its very baseless to report numbers to 'under-count.'
The Centre also notified that there is an excessive contrast in Covid-19 deaths caseload and connected mortality between the Indian States.
"Any speculations setting all States in one envelope would mean skewed mapping data of outliers jointly with States documenting lowest mortality which is bound to stretch the median towards higher and wrong results," it added.
These current media reports on 'significant under-count' of the exact number of individuals who have died in India are established on an unreasonable study as exclusively adults with COVID-19 signs were captured and cannot be thus an illustration of the general population.
It is also to be recorded that the denominator of the cited study is the UNDP estimate for 2020. This is a variety of surveys, censuses, and models, thus an estimate for the Covid-19 deaths.
These reports do not explain whether the same adults were frequently asked, or they cumulatively counted up to 1.37 lakhs. The consequences will be very diverse in both these cases.
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