The Union Health Ministry on Saturday slammed a report that claimed that India’s COVID-19 deaths could be “five to seven times” higher than the official number. The ministry said that the assessment was based on the extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence.

As per a PTI report, a publication claimed that “India has suffered perhaps five to seven times ‘excess deaths’ than the official number of Covid-19 fatalities“.

The ministry termed the article speculative, without any basis and misinformed.

“The unsound analysis of the said article is based on the extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence,” the ministry said in a statement. The statement also added that the studies used by the magazine to estimate the death toll are not validated tools.

The ministry then went on to list the reasons why the studies used by the publication cannot be relied upon.

Discrediting the report, the ministry said that “by their own submission, the magazine states that ‘such estimates have been extrapolated from patchy and often unreliable local government data, from company records and from analyses of such things as obituaries'”.

In order to avoid any inconsistency in the number of deaths being reported, the ministry said that the records are made keeping in mind the ICD-10 codes recommended by the WHO.

Separately, the ministry said in its daily update that the country has reported a total of 29,359,155 cases and 367,081 deaths till Saturday.