WHO says 4.7 million died of Covid in India in new report, Centre objects

The WHO on Thursday said that 14.9 million people were killed either by Covid-19 directly or due to the pandemic's impact on health systems and society, with the global health agency estimating that India had 4.7 million fatalities.

In New Delhi, India strongly objected to the use of mathematical models by the WHO for projecting excess mortality estimates linked to the pandemic in view of the availability of authentic data, saying validity and robustness of the models used and methodology of data collection are questionable.

New estimates from the WHO show that the full death toll associated directly or indirectly with the Covid-19 pandemic, described as "excess mortality", between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 was 14.9 million, range 13.3 million to 16.6 million. "These data not only point to the impact of the pandemic but also to the need for countries to invest in resilient health systems that can sustain essential health services during crises," said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.


WHO is committed to working with all countries to strengthen their health information systems to generate better data for better decisions and better outcomes, he said. Excess mortality includes deaths associated with Covid-19 directly (due to the disease) or indirectly (due to the pandemic's impact on health systems and society).

Deaths linked indirectly to COVID-19 are attributable to other health conditions for which people were unable to access prevention and treatment because health systems were overburdened by the pandemic.

Covid surpassed tuberculosis as the biggest infectious-disease killer in the world. The lung illness killed 1.5 million people in 2020, according to the WHO. Seasonal flu kills from 290,000 to 650,000 people each year, according to the agency.