The Union Health Ministry on Saturday said the media reports highlighting the findings from a paper published in an academic journal claiming excess mortality in 2020 is misleading.

In a statement, the Ministry said, “Some media reports have highlighted the findings from a paper published today in an academic journal Science Advances on life expectancy during the Covid-19 pandemic in India in 2020. These are based on untenable and unacceptable estimates.”

While the authors claim to follow standard methodology of analysing National Family Health Survey, there are critical flaws in methodology, it said.

“The most important flaw is that the authors have taken a subset of households included in the NFHS survey between January and April 2021, compared mortality in these households in 2020 with 2019, and extrapolated the results to the entire country,” the Ministry said.

Stating that the NFHS sample is representative of the country only when it is considered as a whole, it said, “The 23 per cent of households included in this analysis from part of 14 states cannot be considered representative of the country. The other critical flaw is related to possible selection and reporting biases in the included sample due to the time in which these data were collected, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“It is strongly asserted that an excess mortality of about 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper in 2020 over the previous year is a gross and misleading overestimate. It is noteworthy that excess mortality during the pandemic means an increase in deaths due to all causes, and cannot be equated with deaths that were directly caused by Covid-19,” it added.

The Ministry further said, “The paper reports results on age and sex that are contrary to research and program data on Covid-19 in India. The paper claims that excess mortality was greater in females and in younger age groups (particularly 0-19 year old children). Data on about 5.3 lakh recorded deaths due to Covid-19, as well as research data from cohorts and registries consistently shows higher mortality due to Covid-19 in males than females (2:1).These inconsistent and unexplainable results in the published paper further reduce any confidence in its claims.”

“The all-cause excess mortality in 2020 compared with the previous year in India is markedly less than the 11.9 lakh deaths reported in the Science Advances paper. The paper published today is methodologically flawed and shows results that are untenable and unacceptable,” it added.