Based on the data in the medical bulletin, 21% of those tested every day turned out to be Covid-positive while the number was 38% going by the high court numbers.

The controversy over how many Covid deaths the capital had were supposed to have been resolved by the Death Advisory Committee (DAC). But this, too, could soon run into problems given the odd way in which the data is processed, as well as the inordinate delays in doing so; on June 3, the DAC actually classified a death going back to April 15 as a Covid-19 one while on June 5 it said 9 of the 58 deaths that were classified as Covid ones occurred on June 1.

Such controversies over the number of dead come on top of the ones on how many tests the capital is carrying out; the state’s daily medical bulletin has one number while another set of numbers is given to the Delhi high court. Based on the data in the medical bulletin, 21% of those tested every day turned out to be Covid-positive while the number was 38% going by the high court numbers.

Every day, the medical bulletin contains a cumulative number of deaths that had taken place till that time as well as the deaths on that day. So, on May 31, the bulletin said 473 deaths had taken place till then. On June 1, it said 523 deaths had taken place cumulatively, 12 took place that day and the DAC had categorised another 50 deaths that day. The 523 number was arrived at by adding 473 and the 50 from the DAC, but the 12 deaths of June 1 were omitted from the calculation.

On June 2, it reported 556 cumulative deaths, 11 daily deaths and 33 classified by the DAC on that day. Once again, this was got by adding 33 (DAC deaths) to 523 (previous cumulative deaths) but the 11 deaths of June 2 were omitted.

On June 3, it reported 606 cumulative deaths, 9 on that day and 50 classified as Covid deaths by the DAC. To arrive at 606, the 556 cumulative deaths on June 2 were added to the DAC classification of 50; the 9 deaths of June 3 seem to have been omitted.

In just the first five days of June, that is 79 deaths which have not got reported, or a total of 11% of the deaths reported till then. If the Delhi government doesn’t fix this, the data will get progressively less reliable, making any kind of planning redundant. How important it is to get the data right can be seen from the fact that, while Delhi has 28,936 cases right now, a state government panel suggests this could rise to as much as 2.9 lakh by mid-July; reports of what the panel has said talk of the number of beds Delhi requires, but it is easy to calculate the projected infection levels based on this.