Islamabad: After India, the Pakistan government too has rejected the WHO report on number of Covid-19 deaths in the country, questioning the UN body’s methodology to collect data and supposing an error in the software used to collate the numbers. India, last week, strongly contested the methodology, inaccurate sourcing of data, inconsistencies in criteria and use of assumption by the WHO in estimating 47,00,000 excess deaths in India due to Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021.
The WHO estimated there were 2,60,000 Covid deaths in Pakistan - eight times the official figure. Official records state Pakistan had 30,369 Covid deaths with over 1. 5 million infections. “We (authorities) have been gathering data manually on Covid deaths, it could have a difference of a few hundred but it can’t be in hundreds of thousands. This is baseless,” Samaa News quoted health minister Abdul Qadir Patel as saying. He said the government has explained the calculation process to the WHO in a note rejecting the numbers. He said authorities in Pakistan collected the figures from hospitals, union councils, and graveyards. He suspected “some error” in the data collection software used by WHO which has been “showing figures in average”.
