Centre refutes Oxford University study on excess mortality during Covid pandemic

New Delhi: Calling it a “gross and misleading overestimate”, the Union government on Saturday refuted claims of excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic in India, as stated in a study led by Indian-origin researchers from Oxford University and published in the US-based academic journal Science Advances.

The study showed that India experienced 17 per cent higher or 1.19 million more deaths in 2020 than the previous year -- eight times higher than the official number of Covid deaths in India, and 1.5 times higher than the World Health Organization’s estimates.

The findings “are based on untenable and unacceptable estimates. The paper published today is methodologically flawed and shows results that are untenable and unacceptable,” the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) said.

Deaths in India “increased by 4.74 lakh in the year 2020 compared to 2019,” said the ministry, sharing data based on the “highly robust” Civil Registration System (CRS) -- a national portal for registering birth and death events.

“There was a similar increase of 4.86 lakh and 6.90 lakh in death registration in the year 2018 and 2019 over the respective previous years,” it added.

It noted that all excess deaths are not attributable to the pandemic and may include mortality due to all causes.

The increase is also due to “an increasing trend of death registration in CRS (it was 92 per cent in 2019) and a larger population base in the succeeding year,” the MoHFW said, adding that India recorded “about 5.3 lakh deaths due to Covid-19.”

Further, the ministry slammed the authors’ claim to follow the standard methodology of analysing the National Family Health Survey-5 NFHS-5).

“There are critical flaws in methodology,” as the study is based only on 23 per cent of households from part of 14 states from the NFHS survey between January and April 2021.

“It cannot be considered representative of the country”, it said that the “nature of the estimates is erroneous.”

Citing the data from India’s Sample Registration System (SRS) which covers around 84 lakh population in 24 lakh households in 8,842 sample units spread across 36 States/UTs in the country, the ministry noted that India had “very little, if any, excess mortality in 2020 compared with 2019 data (crude death rate 6.0/1000 in 2020, crude death rate 6.0/1000 in 2019) and no reduction in life expectancy.”

Moreover, the MoHFW said that contrary to the study claims of higher female mortality, “research data from cohorts and registries consistently shows higher mortality due to Covid-19 in males than females (2:1) and in older age groups (several-fold higher in > 60 years olds than in 0-15-year-old children).”