Missing out on Covid-19 deaths unlikely: Govt cites 'robust system of reporting'

The Union Health Ministry has been repeatedly advising states and UTs for recording of deaths in accordance with guidelines

Amid reports of undercounting of Covid mortality in India, Health Ministry on Thursday said missing out on deaths was unlikely given the robust and statute-based death registration system in the country.

The ministry said while some cases could go undetected as per the principles of infectious disease and its management, missing out on the deaths was unlikely.

The statement comes against the backdrop of a report by Centre for Global Development (CGD) claiming that the true deaths were likely to be in several millions and not hundreds of thousands as the official count could have missed the deaths that occured in overwhelmed hospitals during the second wave.

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Opposition parties targeted the Modi government for hiding actual Covid death figures, citing the findings of the CGD report published by Arvind Subramanian and two other researchers.

“The extrapolation of deaths has been done on an audacious assumption that the likelihood of any given infected person dying is the same across countries, dismissing the interplay between various direct and indirect factors such as race, ethnicity, genomic constitution of a population, previous exposure levels to other diseases and the associated immunity developed in that population,” the health ministry said.

It said the reports assumed that all the excess mortality figures were Covid-19 deaths, which was not based on facts and totally fallacious.

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“Excess mortality is a term used to describe an all-cause mortality figure and attributing these deaths to Covid-19 is completely misleading,” the ministry said.

It said the reporting of daily new cases and deaths in India followed a bottom-up approach, where districts report the number of cases and deaths to the state governments and to the Union Ministry on a continuous basis.

As early as May 2020, to avoid inconsistency or confusion in the number of deaths being reported, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) issued 'Guidance for appropriate recording of Covid-19 related deaths in India' for correct recording of all deaths by States/UTs as recommended by the WHO for mortality coding.