The WHO on Thursday said that 14.9 million people were killed either by COVID-19 directly or indirectly due to the pandemic's impact on health systems. More important, the global death toll during the pandemic far exceeds what countries have reported.
Nearly a third of the excess deaths globally — 4.7 million — took place in India, according to the WHO estimates. The Indian government’s own figure through the end of 2021 is 481,080 deaths.
Where excess deaths far outstripped the number of reported Covid fatalities, experts said the gap could reflect countries’ struggles to collect mortality data or their efforts to intentionally obscure the toll of the pandemic.
According to sources in New Delhi, India is likely to raise the issue at the World Health Assembly and other multilateral forums.
India has been consistently objecting to the methodology adopted by the WHO to project excess mortality estimates based on mathematical models, the Union Health Ministry said in a statement.
"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 statement said.
The excess death data had been ready since January, but its release had been stalled by objections from India, which disputes the methodology for calculating how many of its citizens died. (Excess mortality includes deaths associated with COVID-19 directly -- due to the disease -- or indirectly, due to the pandemic's impact on health systems and society).
India had also informed the WHO that in view of the availability of authentic data published through Civil Registration System by the Registrar General of India, mathematical models should not be used for projecting excess mortality numbers for India.
The Indian government on Tuesday published the CRS report 2020 based on birth and death reports.
Not just India, other countries have also underreported the Covid fatalities. In Mexico, the excess death toll during the first two years of the pandemic was twice as high as the government’s official tally of Covid deaths. In Egypt, excess deaths were roughly 12 times as great as the official toll. In Pakistan, the figure was eight times as high.
“It’s absolutely staggering what has happened with this pandemic, including our inability to accurately monitor it,” said Dr. Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto, who was a member of the expert working group that made the WHO calculations. “It shouldn’t happen in the 21st century,” he told New York Times.
The NYT report explains that WHO had assembled the expert team in the first months of the pandemic and tasked it with attempting to calculate a measure known as excess mortality: the difference between the number of people who died during the pandemic and the number who would have been expected to die in normal times. The calculations combined national data on reported deaths with new information from localities and household surveys, and with statistical models that aimed to account for deaths that were missed.
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, it is pointed out.
