Counting the dead

What sort of toll has the "second wave" and the government's incompetent response inflicted?

Topics
Coronavirus | Uttar Pradesh | Health Ministry

Devangshu Datta  |  New Delhi 

Devangshu Datta

A few weeks ago, pundits in Meerut went on strike. They wanted danger money — extra payment—for the last rites of Covid-19 victims. Negotiations broke down on classification of corpses.

The priests said, as far as they were concerned, all corpses that weren’t obviously unnatural deaths, should be classified as Covid. The UP government’s official count claimed very few Covid cases. The rest had officially died of natural causes or some mysterious illness. In April 2020, (“Why India needs random Covid tests”) I pointed out lacunae in mortality data, ...

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First Published: Fri, May 21 2021. 23:18 IST
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