The statement said data from India's Sample Registration System (SRS) further confirmed the erroneous nature of the estimates published by the researchers (Unsplash/Representative)
The NFHS sample is representative only when the country is considered as a whole. The statement said the 23% of households included in this analysis from parts of 14 states could not be considered representative of the country.
India's Union Health Ministry said on Saturday that the findings of a paper on life expectancy during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in India published in the academic journal Science Advances were based on “untenable grounds” after some media reports highlighted the findings. Feet, unacceptable” estimate. The ministry said in a statement that while the paper's authors claimed to have followed a standard methodology for analyzing the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5), the methodology had serious flaws.
“The most important flaw is that the authors selected a subset of households included in the NFHS survey from January to April 2021, compared mortality rates among these households in 2020 and 2019, and extrapolated the results to the entire country,” the report states.
The NFHS sample is representative only when the country is considered as a whole. The statement said the 23% of households included in this analysis from parts of 14 states could not be considered representative of the country.
“Another key flaw relates to possible selection and reporting biases in the included sample, as these data were collected during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” it said.
It noted that the paper wrongly argued for the need for such analysis, claiming that vital registration systems in low- and middle-income countries, including India, were weak.
“This is far from correct. India’s Civil Registration System (CRS) is very robust and records more than 99% of deaths. This reporting rate has been rising, from 75% in 2015 to more than 99% in 2020.
Data from the system showed that 474,000 more deaths were registered in 2020 than in 2019, the report said.
The statement said that the number of registered deaths in 2018 and 2019 increased by 486,000 and 690,000 respectively compared with previous years.
“It is worth noting that all excess deaths in CRS during the year were not caused by the epidemic. The excessive number is also due to an upward trend in CRS death registration (92% in 2019) and a larger population base in the coming year.
“There are strong assertions that the death rate reported in the 2020 Science Advances paper was approximately 1.19 million higher than the previous year, which is a serious and misleading overestimation,” the statement said.
It is worth noting that the excessive mortality rate during the epidemic means that the number of deaths caused by various causes has increased and cannot be equated to deaths directly caused by the new coronavirus.
Data from India's Sample Registration System (SRS) further confirms the erroneous nature of the estimates published by the researchers, the statement said.
The SRS covers a population of 8.4 million in 2.4 million households in 8,842 sample units across 36 states and union territories, the report said.
Although the authors take pains to demonstrate that the results of the 2018 and 2019 NFHS analyzes and the SRS analysis are comparable, they completely fail to report that the 2020 SRS data show little, if any, mortality compared to the 2019 data (if so).
The paper reports results on age and gender, which are contrary to research and project data on COVID-19 in India. The paper said excess mortality was higher among women and younger age groups, especially children aged 0-19. Recorded data on approximately 530,000 COVID-19 deaths, as well as study data from cohorts and registries, consistently show that COVID-19 mortality rates are higher in men than in women (2:1) and in older age groups.
These inconsistent and unexplained results in published papers further reduce confidence in its claims, the statement said.
Overall, India's all-cause excess mortality in 2020 compared with the previous year was significantly lower than the 1.19 million reported in the Science Advances paper.
“The paper published today is methodologically flawed and shows results that are untenable and unacceptable,” the statement added.
(This report has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from United News Agency-PTI)
