WHO Covid report: Experts say govt statement inaccurate as Centre issues two different death registration estimates

Latest data says India’s births-and-deaths recording system registered 71 per cent of deaths - much lower than the government claims

Days after India trashing a WHO report on excess Covid-19 deaths, experts who prepared the report have asserted that the government statement carries “wilful inaccuracies” and the data sources used for making the estimates are indeed official data.

The comments came at a time when the Union Health Ministry presented two widely different sets of figures on the extent of India’s death registration even though the states admitted their limitations in capturing every birth and death.

The ministry in a press statement on May 5 said that the level of death registration in India was 99.9 per cent in 2020, 92 per cent in 2019 and 84.6 per cent in 2018. But two days later, the National Family Health Survey 2019-21 says India’s births-and-deaths recording system has registered around 71 per cent of deaths - much lower than the government claims.

Also read: Doctors’ body slams WHO for 'misrepresenting' India’s Covid-19 deaths

“As with the government's previous statement, the most recent one (May 5) contains many wilful inaccuracies,” Jon Wakefield, lead author of the WHO report and a professor of statistics, University of Washington told DH, without citing specific examples. "As the Indian government knows, the estimates of all-cause mortality were not based on the use of temperature or the test positivity rate."

“The methods paper is in the public domain. I would welcome critiques based on science and statistical principles. We are currently revising the paper for The Annals of Applied Statistics, which is a very well-respected statistical journal. We received three very comprehensive referees reports, but the methodology used for subnational estimation will not change in the revision,” Wakefield said.

On the data source, Ariel Karlinksy, another member of the team that prepared the report said, "The data used by WHO is official state-level data, obtained either directly from the official online portals of the states or from Right To Information requests submitted by journalists to these states."

Within hours of the World Health Organisation releasing the report estimating more than 4.74 million excess deaths in India in the two pandemic years – a figure ten times higher than official toll - the ministry came out with a sharply worded statement rejecting such estimates, besides raising questions on the methodologies and data source.

The ministry also cited the latest Civil Registration Report – released on May 3 – to claim the number of excess deaths in 2020 was far less than the WHO estimate.

However, the same CRS report quoted as many as 16 states, including Karnataka, on challenges like manpower shortage, inadequacy of infrastructure and access, and poor awareness as the reasons for not being able to capture all the births and deaths in a state.

Uttar Pradesh and Telangana said they could not properly carry out the birth and death registration exercise because of the pandemic as people did not come forward for reporting. The states also diverted their staff for other pandemic-related works. “India is nowhere close to 99 per cent of deaths registered,” said noted epidemiologist Prabhat Jha from the University of Toronto, who was one of the members of the Technical Advisory Group that oversaw the WHO report.