According to a new analysis published in the Lancet, India’s estimated cumulative excess COVID-19 deaths in the period between January 2020 and December 2021 was 4.07 million, which was about eight-fold higher than the official data reported.

In a response to the claim, on Friday, the Union Health Ministry said the analysis was misinformed, adding that the authors have stated that there were inconsistencies and methodology flaws. The analysis used data of all cause excess mortality (created by another non-peer-reviewed model) as an input, thus raising concerns about the accuracy of the results.

The study took into account different methodologies for different countries and the data for India had been taken from newspaper reports and non-peer-reviewed studies. Hence, adopting data from such sources at varying intervals to extrapolate for the whole pandemic period was unscientific.

India had also rejected previous allegations of underreporting COVID-19 deaths in the country. The ministry said last month that the government of India had a comprehensive definition to classify COVID deaths which was based on the globally acceptable categorization. So, projecting that COVID deaths were under-reported was baseless. (NDTV - PTI, March 11, 2022)