Report claiming high Covid deaths fallacious & inaccurate, says Centre

The Centre on Thursday outrightly rejected media reports claiming that “mortality due to Covid-19 in the country is much higher than the official count and actual numbers have been undercounted.”  The Centre said that reports in some sections of media regarding the claims that Covid-19 mortalities in India are much higher than the official count are “fallacious and completely inaccurate". "The study estimates 32-37 lakh people died from COVID19 by early Nov 2021 in the country, as compared to official figures of Nov 2021 which stood at 4.6 lakh.They are not based on facts and are speculative in nature," the government said in response to the research paper published by French demographer Christophe Guilmoto who claimed that the country's covid-19 fatalities could be much higher.

❌Media reports claiming #COVID19 mortality higher than official counts are ill-informed & speculative

✅India has a robust system of recording COVID deaths based on a statutory framework

✅Reporting of deaths is regularly done in a transparent mannerhttps://t.co/v8raQU4aIJ pic.twitter.com/MDkWf5zPxS

— PIB India (@PIB_India) February 17, 2022

Denying a lapse in India's civil registration system that could be vulnerable to recording deaths, the Centre said it already has a robust and completely transparent system to record covid-19 deaths. "To avoid inconsistency in number of deaths being reported, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has issued guidelines. The date of cases and deaths due to COVID19 are being put in public domain on a daily basis since start of the pandemic."