"Flawed": India Rejects Report Of Reduced Life Expectancy During Covid Pandemic (Photo @Pixabay)

Refuting a recent report on the life expectancy of Indians during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Health and Family Welfare Ministry said that the study was based on untenable and unacceptable estimates and thus a grossly misleading report.

Many media houses reported that the life expectancy in India was 2.6 years lower in 2020 than in 2019, with women and marginalized social groups suffering the most. Citing a study published in Science Advances, news outlets in India and abroad reported that Muslims were the worst sufferers of the pandemic-linked loss of life expectancy. The Scheduled Tribe, Scheduled Cast, and Other Backward Classes followed Muslims in grappling with the lower life expectancy, as per the journal.

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However, in a release issued on Saturday, the Ministry said that the study was “erroneous” and the methodology used by the authors had “critical flaws,” adding that the claims made in the research were inconsistent and unexplainable.

The release said that unlike the journal’s claims, which erroneously argued that the vital registration system in low and middle-income countries, including India, is weak, the Civil Registration System (CRS) in India is “highly robust and captures over 99% of deaths.”

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“This reporting has constantly increased from 75% in 2015 to over 99% in 2020. Data from this system shows death registration has increased by 4.74 lakh in the year 2020 compared to 2019. There was a similar increase of 4.86 lakh and 6.90 lakh in death registration in the years 2018 and 2019 over the respective previous years,” the release asserted.

The release also said that all the excess deaths in a year in the CRS are not attributable to the pandemic, adding that the increased number of deaths is also due to an increasing trend of death registration in the CRS, as it was 92% in 2019.

“It is strongly asserted that an excess mortality of about 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate. It is noteworthy that excess mortality during the pandemic means an increase in deaths due to all causes and cannot be equated with deaths that were directly caused by COVID-19,” the release said.

Pointing out the inconsistencies in age and sex variants of the data examined by the report, the release stated that the paper is flawed and that the all-cause excess mortality in 2020 compared with the previous year in India is markedly less than the 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the paper.

➡️ Media reports highlighting Excess Mortality in 2020 from study in journal Science Advances based on untenable and unacceptable estimates

➡️ Excess mortality reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate

➡️ The…

— PIB India (@PIB_India) July 20, 2024