The Centre on Friday dismissed a recently published article in a “reputed international journal” that provided estimates of all-cause excess mortality for a number of countries based on a mathematical modelling exercise and said that the report is “speculative” and “misinformed.”
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in a statement issued on Friday said that the study has concluded that although reported COVID-19 deaths between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, totalled 5*94 million worldwide, but an estimated 18*2 million (95 per cent uncertainty interval 17*1-19*6) people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic (as measured by excess mortality) over that period. This is yet another estimate on excess mortality due to COVID-19 by another set of researchers, said the ministry.
“Mathematical modelling techniques are essentially process of creating a mathematical representation of a real-world scenario to make a prediction. Such predictions are founded on certain set of inputs either based on real-world scenarios, or approximations of those (which may vary in accuracy according to the technique used) inputs that are not available,” stated the ministry.
It further said, “Often these studies involve, taking a relatively small actual sample and extrapolating the result to the entire population. While this may achieve near accurate results for a small homogenous country/region, such techniques have failed repeatedly to give reliable results for a large, diverse population.”
According to the ministry, the study takes into account different methodologies for different countries and for India, for example, data sources used by this study appears to have been taken from newspaper reports and non-peer-reviewed studies. This model uses data of all-cause excess mortality (created by another non-peer-reviewed model) as an input and this raises serious concerns about the accuracy of the results of this statistical exercise, the ministry said.
It further said that “strangely”, the methodology adopts data from newspapers at varied intervals to extrapolate (without any scientific basis) for the total period under study. The pandemic had multiple surges during the period and varied trajectories across different states (sub-state level also) at any point in time, hence, the methodology used by this study is less than robust, said the ministry. ANI