Health ministry refutes under-reporting of Covid-19 pandemic deaths

The health ministry on Thursday said India had a robust system of calculating deaths, refuting the recent studies that termed the official Covid-19 death toll as vastly undercounted.

The government statement said age-specific infection fatality rates of US and European countries had been used to calculate excess deaths in India based on the sero-positivity in these studies. 

“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,” it said. 

India has officially reported 418,987 deaths from Covid till July 22, the third highest toll in the world. 

The health