Hello,
The Union government in its data war with the World Health Organisation on covid death count conveniently used a flawed set of data to mask the gloomier death count, and ignored a robust number thrown up by another of its own survey.
First, the government tried to stall WHO’s efforts to count India’s true covid death toll. When it couldn’t, the government tried to sully WHO’s covid death estimate that said there were 8.30 lakh Covid-linked deaths in the 100.51 lakh people estimated to have died in 2020. But to rubbish the WHO estimate, the government relied on a set of official death data -- the Sample Registration Survey or the SRS that estimates the total number of people dying each year, and the Civil Registration System that records all the deaths registered in the year.
The government claimed 99.9% of all deaths in 2020 were registered and a total of 81.20 lakh people died in the year -- which were even less than the number of people who died in the non-pandemic year of 2019.
My colleagues Shreegireesh Jalihal and Tapasya took a close look at the SRS data, released on 25 May 2022, and found that the estimate of total deaths that the government is relying on is highly unreliable.
How unreliable? The data that the government marshalled to get back at WHO does the impossible: in some states, the actual registered deaths are four times the number of people the government claims have died.
Take the case of the Union Territory of Chandigarh. Going by SRS, the number of death registrations was four times the number of people estimated to have died in 2020. In Delhi, the registered deaths were nearly double the number of people estimated to have died in 2020.
The list goes on. Twenty of the 36 states and Union Territories saw more registered deaths than the number of people the government claims died.
It is so far away from reality that in the dystopian year of 2020, when death was all around us, government’s data shows fewer people died than in the previous normal year.
It isn’t surprising that the government decided to use a figure that works in its favour and ignore other more robust and reliable estimates coming out of its own National Family Health Survey-5. Going by the NFHS death registration rate and the actual number of deaths recorded in the country’s Civil Registration System, a total of 114.07 lakh people can be estimated to have died in 2020.
These estimates would have shown that the WHO was not off the mark and punched holes in the government's claim of having handled the pandemic well.
The Reporters’ Collective carried out analysis making corrections for the flaws in govt data to show the truth behind the raw numbers.
Click here to read the story published in The Wire.
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