The Centre on Thursday said media reports that alleged India vastly undercounted its coronavirus toll were totally fallacious. The health ministry added that the reports wrongly assumed that all the excess deaths were Covid mortalities.
Many health experts believe that India’s official toll of 4.18 lakh so far is an undercount. But, in May the Modi government had dismissed such concerns as “baseless and absolutely false”.
The Centre’s latest response came two days after a study published by the United States-based Center for Global Development showed that the excess deaths in India were estimated to be between 34 lakh and 47 lakh – about 10 times higher than India’s official Covid-19 toll.
Excess deaths are a measure of how many more people are dying than is expected as compared to the previous few years.
“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,…