India released the 2020 death data several months before schedule since there was a lot of focus on what happened that year, Dr V K Paul, government adviser told national broadcaster Doordarshan late on Tuesday. “We request organizations that have based their numbers on modeling and assumptions and theories to only use this actual data,” he said.
Paul added that there was nothing “dramatic” in the total death data for 2020 and that those were “absolute, correct and counted numbers”.
“There is a public narrative in the media, based on various modelling estimates, that India’s Covid-19 deaths are many times the reported figure – that’s not the case in reality,” he said during the TV interview.
“We now have actual data for 2020, there is no need to do any modelling now. We will have actual, robust data for 2021 too. Modelling can lead to overestimation, absurd estimation.”
Countries around the world reported only 1.83 million CovidD-19 deaths in 2020 but the WHO estimates excess mortality of at least 3 million globally for that year.
India has said it does not agree with the WHO’s methodology, though the scientists working on the latest estimates have defended it
Additional reporting Reuters
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