The controversy about the volume of “excess deaths” in India kicked off on April 16, when a report in the New York Times claimed that an effort by WHO to calculate the real global death toll from the pandemic “has been delayed for months because of objections from India.”
Senior members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with calculating the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic responded Monday to the Union government’s statement that criticized the model they used for arriving at their death estimates for India and said their numbers for excess mortality in India were solely based on data from within the country — and not on some global formula.
The Union health ministry’s questions about the “validity and accuracy” of the modeling exercise by the World Health Organization (WHO) to estimate excess COVID-19 deaths is “inaccurate”, said Jon Wakefield, a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Mortality Assessment, April 18, 2022.
The United Nations health agency is yet to make an official announcement but according to media reports, India’s pandemic toll was an estimated four million — significantly higher than the official count of 520,000. The Union health ministry had expressed its objection to the methodology used by the global health body in a statement released on April 16, 2022.
“One-size-fits-all approaches and models which are true for smaller countries like Tunisia may not apply to India with a population of 1.3 billion,” it noted.
The ministry noted that six letters were issued to WHO between November 17, 2021, and March 2, 2022, but a satisfactory response is still awaited. China, Iran, Bangladesh, Syria, Ethiopia, and Egypt have also expressed similar concerns, it added.
The statement read:
It is not clear why Global Health Estimates 2019 has been used for estimating expected deaths figures for India. For the tier-1 countries such as the United States, France, and Germany, their historical datasets were used. It was repeatedly highlighted that India has a robust system of data collection and management.
Wakefield shared an extract from a paper titled ‘Estimating Country-Specific Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Pandemic’, revealing details on the subnational model that was used to obtain excess mortality estimates for India.
It noted:
We stress that for India the global predictive covariate model is not used and so the estimates of excess mortality are based on data from India only.
The body had access to data from just 17 of the 36 states and Union territories during the pandemic period, a figure that varies by month. Underlining that a range of sources was used to assess deaths at the subnational level, WHO added: The information was either reported directly by the states through official reports and automatic vital registration, or by journalists who obtained death registration information through Right to Information requests.
Researchers working in the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of the WHO Covid-19 Mortality Assessment Group shared an extract from their yet-to-be-published research paper titled “Estimating Country-Specific Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Pandemic” detailing their methodology for countries that did not have official national all-cause mortality data and explained how they arrived at individual mathematical models to reach their estimates.
The controversy about the volume of “excess deaths” in India kicked off on April 16, when a report in the New York Times claimed that an effort by WHO to calculate the real global death toll from the pandemic “has been delayed for months because of objections from India, which disputes the calculation of how many of its citizens died and has tried to keep it from becoming public”. The article put India’s death toll from the pandemic at nearly four million.
