The COVID-19 pandemic extracted a heavy mortality toll across the world during 2020 and 2021, and this has been a huge global public health concern. Given the challenges in direct causal attribution of deaths to COVID-19 infection, the international public health community emphasised the need to measure pandemic impact in terms of excess mortality, derived by comparing observed mortality during the pandemic with expected mortality based on pre-pandemic trends. Ideally, excess mortality estimation requires robust population-based mortality data from death registration systems.
Gaps in registration data
India faced a big challenge in estimating excess deaths directly due to COVID-19 as death registration in India is still about 70%, which further varies widely across States and districts. Pandemic severity was particularly observed in India during the second wave in April-June 2021. India’s death registration data also does not give weekly or monthly mortality data which is essential for excess death calculation.
