Islamabad: Pakistan’s health officials have dismissed the World Health Organisation (WHO) report on coronavirus deaths across the world, saying Pakistan “carefully” reported the fatalities based on a “meticulously designed” system of disease and death reporting.
“Every number reported along with supporting data has been backed up with efficient and reliable mechanisms,” the health ministry said in a statement.
WHO claims excess deaths worldwide
The WHO said that the pandemic led to 14.9 million excess deaths worldwide by the end of 2021, suggesting figures were substantially under-reported in many countries.
The WHO numbers include those who died of COVID-19 as well as those who died of an indirect impact of the outbreak such as healthcare shortages and overwhelmed hospitals during the peak days of the pandemic.
Twenty countries, representing approximately 50 per cent of the global population, account for over 80 per cent of the estimated global excess mortality from January 2020 to December 2021, according to WHO.
Pakistan was one of 20 countries, where the WHO said the mortality rate was eight times higher. Other countries included Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, United Kingdom (UK), Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States (US).
‘Grossly misleading’
Pakistan’s health ministry rejected the WHO mortality figures, saying “Accurate modelling of infectious diseases requires a thorough understanding of ground facts and merely banking on hardcore stats with unrealistic assumptions could be grossly misleading.”
Pakistan’s system of disease and death reporting was “meticulously designed with the help of provincial and local authorities and included thousands of reporting entities with built-in mechanisms of cross verifications”.
This information was fed into the main dashboard of the COVID-19 National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) - the body that supervised Pakistan’s pandemic response.
Pakistan has a robust monitoring system
Talking to Gulf News, Dr Faisal Sultan, the former special assistant to the PM on health affairs, said that there could be a slight margin of error but 8 times more deaths simply “defies logic”. Dr Sultan said that “the health systems were at no point overwhelmed for oxygen or beds” and that the “WHO estimates are based on generalized mathematical extrapolations and assumptions whereas our numbers are based on actual ground data and with dual check systems as above”.
Pakistan has “a robust system” of reporting coronavirus related deaths with strong linkages between health facilities at the federal and provincial levels.
The health departments double-checked the deaths reported in graveyards. “In a predominantly Muslim country, the dead are buried which means the graveyard numbers are a good statistical sample” to verify the number of deaths, he said.
The government health officials said that the graveyard burials in major cities tally the official number of COVID-19 deaths in Pakistan.
Pakistan, a country of 220 million, reported 30,369 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began.
