London/New Delhi: India’s estimated cumulative excess deaths due to Covid-19 between January 2020 and December 2021 were the highest in the world at 4.07 million, around eight times higher than reported, according to a new analysis in the Lancet.
However, responding to the findings, the Union Health Ministry termed Friday the analysis ‘speculative and misinformed’ and said the authors had themselves admitted to several methodology flaws and inconsistencies.
The study takes into account different methodologies for different countries, the Health Ministry said in a statement. For India, for example, data sources used by the study appear to have been taken from newspaper reports and non-peer reviewed studies, it pointed.
“This model uses data of all cause excess mortality (created by another non-peer reviewed model) as an input and this raises serious concerns about the accuracy of the results of this statistical exercise,” the Health Ministry said.
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The Lancet reported Thursday that India accounted for around 22.3 per cent of global excess deaths as of December 31, 2021. The paper estimates excess mortality from the Covid-19 pandemic in 191 countries and territories from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2021.
Although reported Covid-19 deaths in that period totalled 5.94 million worldwide, the Lancet paper estimates that 18.2 million people died worldwide because of the Covid-19 pandemic, as measured by excess mortality, over that period. This is around three times higher than previously estimated.
The documented deaths due to Covid-19 in India over that period stood at around 4,89,000, the journal says in the paper “Estimating excess mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic: A systematic analysis of Covid-19-related mortality, 2020-21”.
Excess mortality measures the additional deaths in a given time period compared to the number usually expected and is not dependent on how Covid-19 deaths are recorded.
“For India, empirical assessment of excess mortality for 12 states used data from the civil registration system. For different months during the first and second waves of the Covid-19 epidemic in the 12 states in India, total numbers of deaths for those states during the corresponding months were made available,” the peer-reviewed paper reports.
“At the country level, the highest numbers of cumulative excess deaths due to Covid-19 were estimated in India (4.07 million [3.71-4.36]),” the paper says.
After India, the highest numbers of cumulative excess deaths due to Covid-19 were estimated in the US (1.13 million), Russia (1.07 million), Mexico (7,98,000), Brazil (7,92,000), Indonesia (7,36,000) and Pakistan (6,64,000).
“These seven countries accounted for more than half of the global excess deaths due to Covid-19 over the 24-month period,” the report says.