12 lakh excess deaths in Covid year, reveals report; govt says methodology flawed
mortality data from the National Family Health Survey 2019-21 and concluded that nearly 12 lakh additional deaths occurred in 2020, which is eight times higher than the official Covid-19 death toll reported in India for that year. The Health Ministry has rejected this estimate, calling it «exaggerated and misleading,» and has criticized the study for its flawed methodology.
According to the study published in open access journal Sciences Advances, the authors found that in the subsample they studied, there was a reduction in life expectancy at birth of 2.6 years between 2019 and 2020, larger than reductions documented in any high-income country. This reduction was substantial even relative to trends in India: overall life expectancy at birth in 2020 was equivalent to all-India levels over a decade earlier.
Relative to the 1.3-year life expectancy loss among high-caste Hindus, the loss for Muslims was 5.4 years.
Health ministry silent on paper's claims on SC/STs, Muslims
Union Health Ministry on Saturday criticised the methodology of taking a subset of households included in the NFHS survey between Jan and April 2021, and comparing the mortality in these households in 2020 with 2019, and then extrapolating the results to the entire country.
«The NFHS sample is representative of the country only when it is considered as a whole. 23% of households included in this analysis from part of 14 states cannot be considered representative of the country. The other critical flaw is related to possible selection and
