COVID-19: Union Ministry refutes reports claiming India's COVID death toll "undercounted"

Amidst growing COVID-19 cases in India, there have been several reports of undercounting of COVID deaths in the country. Responding to such claims, the Central Government has finally refuted such reports that claim India’s COVID-19 death toll as 'vastly been undercounted'. According to the Union Government, the reports based on the COVID-19 death toll are not based on facts and are totally fallacious. 

Union Ministry on COVID-19 death toll reports

The Central Government on Thursday raised several questions on media reports that claim that India’s COVID-19 death toll being undercounted. An official statement has been released regarding the matter. 

"Given the robust and statute-based death registration system in India, while some cases would go undetected as per the principles of infectious disease and its management, missing out on the deaths is unlikely", the statement read.

"This could also be seen in the case fatality rate, which, as of 31st December 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", it added.

The Union Government further dismissed media reports targeting India's COVID-19 death toll being miscalculated. It said that these reports are using the US and European countries' age-specific infection fatality rates to calculate excess deaths in India which are based on the seropositivity.

"The extrapolation of deaths has been done on an audacious assumption that the likelihood of any given infected person dying is the same across countries, dismissing the interplay between various direct and indirect factors such as race, ethnicity, genomic constitution of a population, previous exposure levels to other diseases and the associated immunity developed in the population", the statement said.

Talking about India’s strategy for COVID-19 testing, the government said that India has adopted 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. 

Union Government on the calculation of COVID-19 deaths

Speaking about the method of reporting COVID-19 deaths in India, the central government said that follows a 'bottom-up' approach for recording the Coronavirus death numbers. For instance, the district reports the total number of deaths and active cases to the state governments followed by the Union Ministry. This entire system is drawn according to the guidelines provided by the ICMR since last year. The ICMR guidelines are issued based on the recommendations of the World Health Organisation (WHO) for monitoring the pandemic situation.

(Source: PTI)