-The Hindu Facts do not support the argument that India has a robust system of registering births and deaths The World Health Organization (WHO)’s estimate of excess deaths due to COVID-19 in India triggered several responses. Among them was the response of several State Health Ministers, who slammed the WHO and asserted that India has a “robust, legal and transparent system for data collection and COVID mortality surveillance”. This new-found love for the...

-Press release by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) dated 18 May 2022 Geneva, 18 May 2022 (WMO): Four key climate change indicators – greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification – set new records in 2021. This is yet another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere, with harmful and long-lasting ramifications for sustainable development and...

-The Telegraph  Jon Wakefield picks holes in Narendra Modi government’s twin claims Jon Wakefield was disappointed. India’s health ministry had issued a statement decrying the methodology adopted by the World Health Organisation to estimate excess deaths worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The exercise indicated 4.7 million excess deaths in India, 9.8 times the country’s official Covid-19 death toll. The ministry statement itself didn’t surprise Wakefield. Five times since July 2021,...

-The Telegraph Union health ministry asserts that Civil Registration System figures should be considered 'authentic' A table on “estimated deaths” is missing from India’s annual birth-and-death report for 2020. The absence has fuelled fresh questions about how the Union health ministry calculated that authorities had registered 99.9 per cent of the country’s deaths in 2020, the Covid-19 outbreak’s first year. A 99.9 per cent registration level would mean the country had recorded almost all...

-The Hindu Reporting every death with the accurate and verifiable cause of death is essential for public health The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated the number of deaths in India directly or indirectly attributable to COVID-19 to be 4.74 million. This is the highest for any country and nine times the nation’s official count of 5,24,000 as of May 2022. The WHO numbers are derived through robust statistical methods that consider...