The Union Health Ministry on Thursday strongly refuted reports that India’s death count due to Covid-19 could be in the range of 3.5 to 5 millions.
The Government on Thursday said India has a robust and statute-based death registration system, while some cases could go undetected as per the principles of infectious disease and its management, missing out on the deaths is unlikely.
“This could also be seen in the case fatality rate, which, as of December 31, 2020, stood at 1.45 per cent, and even after an unexpected surge observed in the second wave in April-May 2021, the case fatality rate today stands at 1.34 per cent,” said the Health Ministry.
The Ministry was responding to news reports quoting findings from some recent studies.
US and European countries’ age-specific infection fatality rates have been used to calculate excess deaths in India based on the sero-positivity.
The Ministry added that 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 the appropriate recording of Covid-19 related deaths in India’ for correct recording of all deaths by States/UTs as per ICD-10 codes recommended by the World Health Organization for mortality coding.
Further, the Ministry said excess mortality is a term used to describe an all-cause mortality figure, and attributing these deaths to Covid-19 is completely misleading. The reports assume that all the excess mortality figures are Covid deaths, which is not based on facts and totally fallacious.
“India has a thorough contact tracing strategy. All the primary contacts, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic are tested for Covid-19. The true detected cases are the ones that test positive with RT PCR, which is the gold standard of the Covid-19 test. In addition to the contacts, given the vast availability of more than 2,700 testing laboratories in the country, anyone who wants to get tested is able to get the test done. This coupled with vast IEC about the symptoms and access to medical care has ensured people could reach out to hospitals in case of need,” the Ministry said.
In addition, the robustness of the statute based Civil Registration System (CRS) ensures all the births and deaths in the country get registered. The CRS follows a process of data collection, cleaning, collating, and publishing the numbers, which although is a long time- consuming process, ensures no deaths are missed out. For the expanse and the amplitude of the activity, the numbers are usually published the next year, the Ministry stated.
