India exceeds COVID deaths :Health workers and relatives burned the bodies during the mass funeral of the victims of COVID-19, West Hill in Kozhikode.
“It is incorrect,” said a scientist, who is part of the World Health Organization (WHO) team that estimates the death toll from the COVID-19 epidemic worldwide, describing India’s opposition to the method used. Upcoming WHO analyzes are reported to calculate India’s actual value to be significantly higher than official estimates.
The union’s Department of Health on Saturday, in response to the article, “India Suspends WHO’s Efforts to Make a Global Covid Death Toll Public” on the same day in the New York Times (NYT), raised concerns against the WHO’s method of calculating deaths.
To date, WHO has not yet officially released India estimates but NYT estimates that the health agency has estimated 15 million deaths by the end of 2021, or more than double the official figure of six million internationally reported. In this regard, India is causing the deaths of four million people, or about eight times the current population of 5.2 lakh (as of Tuesday), the report cited unnamed sources.
A statement from the Department said it had been in regular contact with the WHO on the matter and shared “concerns in this way”, with China, Iran, Bangladesh, Syria, Ethiopia and Egypt to the WHO six times since November 2021.
Internationalization
What is most troubling in India is that these mortality figures are calculated using a statistical model that does not calculate size and diversity in the country. The WHO approach divided countries into Category 1 and Phase 2 countries, and used the death toll from Phase 1 countries and applied them to Phase 2 countries — an unfair practice, India argues. It also refuses to use ‘global covariates’ such as monthly temperatures and average monthly deaths, revenue.
World Health Organization
John Wakefield, a member of WHO’s Technical Advisory Group in charge of modeling, wrote on Twitter on Monday that the Department’s statement on the cause of death was “inaccurate” and provided a link to the research paper outlining the method used.
Wakefield is Professor of Biostatistics at Washington State University.
In many countries that have provided a national mortality rate, or a cause of death every month, the authors rely on the data provided. Argentina, China, India, Indonesia, and Turkey, on the other hand, have never had a national cause of death again — by 2021– only a few months’ data. India had data from only 17 countries. India data, noted research paper, is taken from the registered death toll at the Provincial and Local levels which were directly reported by the provinces through official reports and important automatic registrations, or journalists who obtained death registration information through Right.
For information requests. “We emphasize that in India, the global predictable covariate model is not in use and therefore the mortality rates are based on data from India only,” notes the paper.
The difference in death
The objection raised by India is that “… the model provides different mortality rates when using data from Category 1 countries and unconfirmed data from 18 Indian countries.
Such wide variations raise concerns about the legitimacy and accuracy of this modeling application, “emphasizing that India does not regard this State-class data as ‘guaranteed,’ Extreme mortality is the difference in mortality in the 2020 and 2021 epidemics, compared to the previously recorded death rate. of the 2019 and 2018 epidemics. It is thought that most of the deviations that rise in the pre-epidemic years represent the death of COVID-19.
Over the years, independent research efforts by researchers and newspapers, including Hindu, have provided evidence that COVID-10 deaths in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and other countries have more than doubled the number of deaths reported by the States.
The main reason for the disagreement is that the States have a wide range of health facilities and that many deaths outside of hospital facilities are not recorded and the cause of their deaths is not determined. It is a separate test of sample registration in the housing division, such deaths are revealed, and this process, Indian officials have reiterated, takes time.
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Studies from Indian mortality data
It is not the first time that India has challenged the studies that measure the mortality rate of this epidemic in the country. The Lancet reported last month that India had caused more than 20 percent of the world’s total deaths from December 31, 2021.
India’s contention that the study was based on numbers from “newspaper reports and peer-reviewed studies,” and that it did not. “It includes” numerous epidemiological efforts, including the closure of sites, areas of content, testing and monitoring of human communication, widespread dissemination and implementation of clinical management principles and the largest vaccination campaign in the world, which is the basis for epidemic control in the country. “
The controversy over India’s “high mortality rate” began on April 16, when a report in The New York Times stated that the WHO’s effort to calculate the actual number of deaths worldwide due to the epidemic had been delayed for months. opposition from India. “
Top members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with counting the number of people killed by the coronavirus on Monday responded Monday with a statement from the Union government criticizing the model they used to reach their mortality rate in India, and said their death toll was too high. in India they were based solely on data from within the country – not on a specific global formula.
While the number of people officially killed as a result of the epidemic was 5.9 million between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, a new study estimates that 18.2 million people died over the same period, indicating that the overall impact of the epidemic could be enormous.
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