The Covid-19 pandemic hit the world in late 2019 and since then, the pandemic has claimed over 5.5 million lives so far. If this sounds dire, a report in Nature will make you even more concerned – according to the report, while 5.5 million is the official data, the actual death toll could be several times higher.
“Some official data in this regard is flawed, scientists have found. And more than 100 countries do not collect reliable data on expected or actual deaths, or do not release them in a timely manner,” Nature reports.
Several countries, including India, have been accused of trying to hide their actual Covid-19 deaths, to protect their image and avoid criticism on the global stage.
The report, published in Nature, takes into account the machine learning approach of The Economist magazine in London. According to this, there are issues with data collection and it claims big – the actual deaths could be between two and four times higher than the official COVID-19 data!
The report goes on to give examples. It added that countries such as the Netherlands counted as the Covid toll only those deaths in the early period of the pandemic, in which individuals died in hospital after testing positive for Covid-19. Belgium, on the other hand, included community deaths and all those who died after showing symptoms of the disease, even if they were not diagnosed, Nature reports.
The report also noted that the World Mortality Dataset (WMD) lacks extra-death estimates for more than 100 countries, including China, India and several countries in Africa. “That’s because those countries either don’t collect death statistics or don’t publish them fast enough,” it noted. The excess mortality rate means the number of additional people who died compared to the figures before the crisis.
In June 2021, the Center had refuted a report by The Economist, according to which the country’s toll due to COVID-19 could be “five to seven times” higher than the official numbers provided. But the Union Health Ministry rubbished such reports and said that such reports are “without any basis and have been misinformed”.
Meanwhile, as per the data released today (January 20, 2022) by the Ministry of Health, 3,17,532 new Covid-19 cases reported in India491 deaths in the last 24 hours, taking the total death toll to 4,87,693.
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