The Government of India on Thursday released a statement downright denying the findings of a study that claimed India’s COVID-19 death toll was six to eight times higher than official figures.

The statement, titled, ‘COVID-19: Myths vs Facts’, was released by the Press Information Bureau (PIB), and called reports of a higher death toll “fallacious and completely inaccurate.”

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“There have been some media reports based on a published research paper alleging that mortality due to COVID19 in India is much higher than the official count and actual numbers have been undercounted. The study estimates that people between 3.2 million to 3.7 million have died from COVID19 by early Nov 2021 in the country, as compared to official figures of Nov 2021 of 0.46 million (4.6 lakhs),” the statement began.

“As has been stated earlier for similar media reports, it is again clarified that these reports are fallacious and completely inaccurate. They are not based on facts and are speculative in nature,” it added.

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“India has a robust system of reporting deaths including COVID-19 deaths that is compiled regularly at different levels of governance starting from the Gram Panchayat level to the District-level and State level. The reporting of deaths is regularly done in a transparent manner. All deaths are compiled by the Centre after being independently reported by States,” the government further said of India’s official COVID-19 death tally, adding, “Therefore, to project that COVID deaths have been under-reported is without basis and devoid of justification.”

The government’s statement went on to contest the basis of the study that claimed India’s death toll was six to eight times higher.

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“The study quoted in the media reports has taken four distinct subpopulations — the population of Kerala, Indian Railways employees, MLAs and MPs, and school teachers in Karnataka, and uses triangulation process to estimate nationwide deaths. Any such projections based on limited data sets and certain specific assumptions must be treated with extreme care before extrapolating the numbers by putting all states and country of the size of India in a single envelope,” the statement said.

“This exercise runs the risk of mapping skewed data of outliers together and is bound to give wrong estimations thereby leading to fallacious conclusions,” it added.

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The statement was referring to a study by Christophe Guilmoto from the Centre de Sciences Humaines in Delhi, which claimed that India’s COVID-19 death toll after the second wave was 3.2 to 3.7 million, as opposed to the official death toll of 0.46 million (4.6 lakhs).

The study’s estimate of India’s COVID-19 death toll, if true, would put India far ahead of other countries in terms of total COVID-19 deaths: the US, which is currently leading in terms of deaths, has a death toll of around 0.9 million, while Brazil is second with 0.6 million deaths.

“We are used to criticisms of our computations. But a gap existed between the deaths reported by the government and what was reported from the ground. There was indirect evidence of serious underestimate, but it was difficult to estimate,” Guilmoto told the Deccan Herald after his study garnered both media attention and criticism from some quarters in the country.