India on Thursday expressed strong objection over the World Health Organisation (WHO) for releasing the country's Covid-19 death estimates "without adequately addressing India's concerns".
In a statement released by the Ministry of Health (MoH), India said, "Despite India’s strong objection to the use of mathematical models for projecting excess mortality estimates, WHO has released excess mortality estimates without adequately addressing India’s concerns. Validity of models used, & data methodology are questionable."
WHO had earlier released the world's Covid-19 death estimates, and said that the full death toll associated directly or indirectly with the COVID-19 pandemic between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 was approximately 14.9 million (range 13.3 million to 16.6 million).
In the total deaths across the world, the WHO attached 4.7 million deaths to India alone, reported news agency Reuters. In the report, the U.N. body said that India's death toll is three times higher than the official data.
Excess mortality is calculated as the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of the pandemic based on data from earlier years.
The WHO claimed, that most of the excess deaths (84 per cent) are concentrated in South-East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Some 68 per cent of excess deaths are concentrated in just 10 countries globally. Middle-income countries account for 81 per cent of the 14.9 million excess deaths (53 per cent in lower-middle-income countries and 28 per cent in upper-middle-income countries) over the 24-month period, with high-income and low-income countries each accounting for 15 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively.
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