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India reported 4,164 Covid cases on Friday with 255 deaths in the last 24 hours till 8:00 am, as per the Health Ministry data. The cases have been less than 10,000 since February 28. The daily and the weekly positivity rate in the country stood at 0.52 per cent and 0.55 per cent respectively. It is to be noted that the daily infections in Kerala on Friday were at 1,175 with the daily positivity at 4.33 percent. In Maharashtra 318 cases were reported on Friday with one Covid death, as per the State Government.
Speculative numbers
Meanwhile, on the Lancet report which claimed that India registered highest Covid deaths between January 2020 and December 2021, the Health Ministry said that the findings were ‘speculative and misinformed’. According to the report, more than four million deaths were recorded due to Covid, eight times higher than the reported deaths. The Government said that the authors have themselves admitted to several methodology flaws and inconsistencies, while coming to the conclusion.
“While this may achieve near accurate results for a small homogenous country/region, such techniques have failed repeatedly to give reliable results for a large, diverse population. The study takes into account different methodologies for different countries and for India, for example, data sources used appears to have been taken from newspaper reports and non-peer reviewed studies,” the Government statement said on the methodology used by the paper..
“This model uses data of all cause excess mortality (created by another non-peer reviewed model) as an input and this raises serious concerns about the accuracy of the results of this statistical exercise,” it further added.
Vaccine doses
As per the CoWIN dashboard, over 17.16 lakh vaccine doses were administered till 8:00 pm. So far, more than 179 crore shots have been administered since the vaccination drive began in January last year. Also, the Government informed Friday that more than 16.7 lakh vaccines were still lying with State/UTs to be administered.
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