the release of a report by WHO that guess more deaths During covid-19 pandemic The death toll from COVID-19 in India between January 2020 and December 2021 is almost 10 times that of 4.8 lakh, the most for any country, not surprising. The pandemic not only contributed to an increase in disease-related mortality, especially of the old and infirm, but also disrupted health systems, resulting in many other avoidable deaths. A robust estimate of excess deaths was necessary to understand the impact of the pandemic in India, where post-event death registration is not universal across states and medical certification of deaths are far fewer in number. The government has strongly denied the numbers and dismissed the methodology as saying that the WHO’s approach is based on model estimates and not on actual data. It finally countered this by releasing Citizen Registration System Report for 2020 (two days before the release of the WHO report) and to say that the cumulative increase in the number of deaths in 2020 was only 4.74 lakh, which is less than the corresponding number in 2019. Whereas most of the deaths – close to two thirds – occurred during A second wave in India from March to June 2021 (and later in some states such as Kerala), and therefore the late release of the CRS 2020 report does not completely negate WHO’s estimates which are available from “sub-national” Based on statistics of registered deaths. “The units are, in fact, an anomaly for the 2020 data.
The WHO estimate for the states was based on CRS registration data obtained by news organisations. bulk of them Hindu, For 2020, cumulatively, the additional death estimates for most of the states (closer to 5.5 lakh for 12 states), for which the data was obtained, match the CRS 2020 count (5.3 lakh). Discrepancies are significantly higher for states where CRS data was only partially or was not previously available. An example of this is Uttar Pradesh where deaths (8.73 lakhs in 2020 vs 9.45 lakhs in 2019) and birth registrations (48.5 lakhs in 2020 vs 51.3 lakhs in 2019) declined significantly and hence the number of deaths across the country. But without the release of sample registration system data, it is difficult to believe that the registration level has increased despite a decrease in actual birth and death registrations in states like UP. The NFHS-5 2021 interviews show that death registrations in 2020 were lower than in previous years, as opposed to the government’s claims based on CRS 2020. The government should not dismiss the WHO’s estimates and instead start its exercise on additional deaths based on it. Registration data in CRS/SRS. After all, other methods, including surveys, have confirmed the fact that there was high reporting of COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic.