Health ministry dispels varying perceptions about Covid-19 deaths.

ISLAMABAD -- The Ministry of National Health Services (NHS) has dispelled the varying general perceptions in the country about the deaths due to Covid-19 pandemic and claimed that its data is accurate and has been verified by the defunct National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) through analysis of graveyard data of major cities.

While it is generally believed that more people died of Covid-19 in Pakistan than the numbers released by the government, an analysis of graveyards across major cities has not shown the mortality above the official figures, a senior official of the ministry said.

Similarly, there is a section of people in the country who believe that the previous government had used the pandemic for political objectives and it had always presented exaggerated figures about the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths due to the disease.

However, Sajid Shah, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Health Services (NHS), said that while heath indicators never remained reliable in Pakistan, the country had been at the forefront of decision making using data and analytics since the onset of the pandemic. Every number reported along with supporting data has been backed up with reliable mechanisms.

'A reporting mechanism is set in place whereby every Covid-19 related death is reported at the district level which is then collated at the provincial level by the respective healthcare systems, and finally a cumulative number is shared at the national level,' he said.

The defunct National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) data showed that 28,000 people had succumbed to the virus. However, it is a general perception that more people lost their lives due to the virus but could not be reported because of the faulty mechanism of collecting data.

Mr Shah said as a nation with a 97pc majority of Muslims, most fatalities were buried and a record was maintained about every burial within a specific graveyard. The maintenance of burial data, including the date, time and location, is the standard procedure that all graveyards follow.

'A mortality comparison was carried out to effectively check the monthly cumulative deaths recorded in the past three years. The mortality audit carried out by the defunct NCOC critically looked at the graveyard data of big cities. There was a rise in deaths corresponding to each wave (which showed an increasing number of Covid-19 cases overall) that hit Pakistan but the cumulative number for the past two years did not...