New Delhi: India has shared its concerns with the methodology along with other member states through a series of formal communications, including six letters issued to the World Health Organisation, the Union Health Ministry said.
The reaction came in response to New York Times article titled “India Is Stalling the WHO’s Efforts to Make Global Covid Death Toll Public” dated April 16, 2022.
“India has been in regular and in-depth technical exchange with WHO on the issue. The analysis while uses mortality figures directly obtained from Tier -I set of countries, uses a mathematical modelling process for Tier II countries (which includes India). India’s basic objection has not been with the result (whatever they might have been) but rather the methodology adopted for the same”, the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry has raised the question on how the statistical model projects estimates for a country of geographical size & population of India and also fits in with other countries which have smaller population. Such one size fit all approach and models which are true for smaller countries like Tunisia may not be applicable to India with a population of 1.3 billion. WHO is yet to share the confidence interval for the present statistical model across various countries, said the ministry.
“The model gives two highly different sets of excess mortality estimates of when using the data from Tier I countries and when using unverified data from 18 Indian states. Such a wide variation in estimates raises concerns about validity and accuracy of such a modelling exercise”, it stated.
India is a country of continental proportions, climatic and seasonal conditions vary vastly across different states and even within a state and therefore, all states have widely varied seasonal patterns. “Thus, estimating national level mortality based on these 18 states data is statistically unproven,” the statement stated.A
It said further that the Global Health Estimates (GHE) 2019 on which the modeling for Tier II countries is based, is itself an estimate. The present modeling exercise seems to be providing its own set of estimates based on another set of historic estimates, while disregarding the data available with the country. It is not clear as to why GHE 2019 has been used for estimating expected deaths figures for India, whereas for the Tier 1 countries, their own historical datasets were used when it has been repeatedly highlighted that India has a robust system of data collection and management.