corona virus
– Photo: PTI (File)
Expansion
The Union Health Ministry has criticised a recent study published in the US academic journal ‘Science Advances’. The study claimed that India experienced excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The ministry termed the study as erroneous in nature.
The study claims that India experienced 17 per cent more deaths (11.9 lakh) than in 2019. According to this, this figure is eight times more than the official number of corona deaths in India and 1.5 times more than the estimates of the World Health Organization.
The ministry said the findings of the study are unacceptable. The methodology adopted by its authors has many flaws. The ministry said the authors used a subset of households from the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) conducted between January and April 2021 and compared mortality rates in these households in 2020 with those in 2019 and then disseminated the findings across the country.
The statement said that the methodology of the study published today is flawed and such conclusions are untenable and unacceptable. The ministry argued that the NFHS sample is considered representative of the entire country only when it is done holistically. The 23 per cent of households included in the analysis of 14 states cannot be considered representative of the entire country.