Islamabad: The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised questions on Pakistans Covid-19 death toll that laid bare how vastly the country had undercounted victims, Geo News reported.
According to a new WHO report, almost three times as many people have died around the world as a result of Covid-19 against what the official data show.
The world health body estimated that the pandemic killed around 15 million people worldwide in 2020 and 2021 — nearly triple the number of deaths officially attributed to the disease.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the figures were eight times as high.
Reacting to the WHO panel’s report, former special assistant to then Prime Minister on health, Faisal Sultan, said the WHO data on Coronavirus deaths in Pakistan is “not reliable”.
Sultan defended the government’s death reports, saying that studies of the number of graveyard burials in major cities did not reveal large numbers of uncounted victims of the pandemic, Geo News reported.
In a statement, he said: “I have to look at the WHO report in detail. We checked the cemetery record to determine the number of deaths from Coronavirus. We also checked this record through our own system.”
Sultan added: “While our Covid death record is accurate, it is not possible to have a 100 per cent correct death toll… It could be 10-30 per cent less, but to say it was eight times less is unbelievable.”
He also said that the WHO report was based on hypothetical data, which was “not authentic”.
(IANS)
