‘No Basis At All’: Centre Trashes NYT Report On Covid Deaths

The Indian government on Thursday rubbished all the observations made by New York Times calling it “baseless and outrageous”. The NYT called India’s Covid reporting as “Poor record-keeping”, “lack of widespread testing” and “India grossly understating the true state of the pandemic.

The observations made in the journals had two focal points. Firstly, how the number of cases in India is more than 25 times higher than the official figures. India has reported 2.69 crores Covid-19 cases and 3.07 lakh deaths as of 24 May 2021, but an analysis by The New York Times says the actual figures are likely to be 70.07 crore cases and 42 lakh deaths (14 times higher) in a worst-case scenario.

Dr VK Paul, India’s top covid adviser and member of NITI Aayog member, said the projections of deaths from Covid by NYT had no basis and appeared to have been determined based on a virtual interaction with some experts. “Five people sit together and do a virtual meeting and decide. Perhaps that is how they did this. We do not accept this. This is baseless and outrageous,” Paul said. The NYT report also spoke about how the actual cases are at 25 times the reported cases which means over 65 plus crore cases.

“We reject the NYT report on Covid deaths in India: it is not backed by facts,” Health Ministry spokesperson Lav Agarwal said. “NYT report is based on an assumption of some people. This should not have been published. We have a strong mortality tracking system that has stood the test of time. Indian sample registration system is respected the world over. Let that data come. Adjustments of late reporting can happen in a large country like ours. It is possible to have missed some deaths but NYT’s projections are outrageous,” Paul said.

“This is where the flaw is. Our deaths are being reported through the sample registration system. Late reporting is possible. On what basis has NYT pulled out new IFRs for India? If the same standards of exaggerated IFRs based on higher actual infections shown by serosurveys were applied to New York their IFR in May last was 0.97 pc and reported deaths were 16000. If I make this three times deaths rise to 50,000 and if I make them 12 times deaths are 1,75,000 but they don’t use these assumptions for themselves. Distorted estimates have been made for India,” said Paul.

India, which has a staggeringly large number of people living in abject poverty, simply leaves chances to spread the virus out into densely packed cities and infect large numbers of people. And these deaths mostly go unreported. Critics argue that an overcrowded nation that has nearly a billion and a half people is not being struck very hard by a widescale pandemic, that defies logic.