"Not right to look at other sources": ICMR DG Rajiv Bahl on study claiming 11.8 lakh excess deaths in India during 2020 Covid

New Delhi [India], July 20 : Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Director General Rajiv Bahl said that it is not right to look at other sources after the central government rejected the UK researchers study claiming 11.8 lakh excess deaths in India during the 2020 Covid pandemic.
"The paper that has been published today is looking at COVID-19 mortality and the reduction in life expectancy during the pandemic. What it is trying to look at is excess mortality during the COVID pandemic in the year 2020. Now the first thing to understand is this is not COVID deaths only. This is all the deaths due to any cause. So it should not be confused at all with COVID deaths," Rajiv Bahl said while speaking to ANI on Saturday.
"Secondly, we should look at the data that we already have. We always should look at the highest quality data that we can access. There are two sources of high-quality data in India. One is our Civil Registration System. People erroneously still believe that our system is grossly incomplete. This is not true... The civil registration system is extremely robust now at 291 thousand units which report births and deaths... Our coverage of reported deaths today is over 99 per cent. So clearly when you have data from 99 per cent of deaths, it is not right to look at other sources," he added.
NITI Aayog member VK Paul dismissed the study, claiming 11.8 lakh excess deaths in India during the 2020 Covid pandemic, referring to it as "outrageous."
Paul said that the study used "lot of extrapolation" and added that it was not reflective of the entire nation and that only households in 14 States and UTs were used for the inferences.
"The problem with this is that this survey was going on in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic but that phase covered only 14 states and Union Territories. So what they have done is they have used lot of extrapolation," Paul said while speaking to ANI on Saturday.
He said that the point made by the government was that the study was "poorly conducted" using "assumptions and extrapolation," which has led to misleading results. "We believe that excess mortality per se, all cause, is much lower than this for the year in question. And also that all excess mortality, even in our own system, and that number is 4.74 lakh, is really not COVID mortality. So this needs to be seen in a perspective," Paul said.
Referring to some media reports have highlighted the findings from a paper published on July 20 in an academic journal Science Advances on life expectancy during the Covid-19 pandemic in India in 2020, a Ministry of Health and Family Welfare release stated on Saturday that these are based on untenable and unacceptable estimates.
The release stated that the paper erroneously argues for the need for such analyses claiming that vital registration system in low and middle income countries including India is weak. This is far from being correct. The Civil Registration System (CRS) in India is highly robust and captures over 99 per cent of deaths, it added.
"This reporting has constantly increased from 75 per cent in 2015 to over 99 per cent in 2020. Data from this system shows death registration has increased by 4.74 lakh in the year 2020 compared to 2019. There was a similar increase of 4.86 lakh and 6.90 lakh in death registration in the year 2018 and 2019 over the respective previous years. Notably, all excess deaths in a year in the CRS are not attributable to the pandemic. Excess number is also due to an increasing trend of death registration in CRS (it was 92 per cent in 2019) and a larger population base in the succeeding year," the release stated.
"It is strongly asserted that an excess mortality of about 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate. It is noteworthy that excess mortality during the pandemic means increase in deaths due to all causes, and cannot be equated with deaths that were directly caused by Covid-19," it added.
The release further said that the all-cause excess mortality in 2020 compared with the previous year in India is markedly less than the 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper The paper published today is methodologically flawed and shows results that are untenable and unacceptable.