Weekly deaths up 19%; half the toll due to old fatalites

NEW DELHI: After two straight weeks of decline, Covid-19 fatalities reported in India registered a 19% rise in the week ending Sunday, mainly driven up by as many as 12,573 “backlog” deaths added to the toll during this period, the highest for any seven-day span so far.
Deaths from earlier days constituted half of the over 25,000 fatalities recorded during the last seven days, raising the week’s toll to the highest in three weeks. Maharashtra announced the highest number of backlog deaths, as many as 8,622, during June 7-13, while Bihar accounted for 3,951. On Sunday, Maharashtra added 2,288 old fatalities, its highest count so far.
Last week, 21,074 deaths were recorded, of which at least 3,218 were old deaths mainly reported by Maharashtra. Backlog deaths are fatalities from past days that had remained unreported due to delays by hospitals or other reasons. While acknowledgment of these deaths is a welcome exercise that would lead to a more accurate assessment of Covid casualties, only a handful of states have done so as a matter of public record. These include Maharashtra, Bihar and Uttarakhand.
Meanwhile, fresh cases continued to decrease sharply. There were just over 6 lakh cases recorded during the week, a 30% drop from the previous seven days, when the count was over 8.6 lakh. At the height of the second wave, India had recorded more than 27.4 lakh cases in a week (May 3-9). This means weekly cases have dropped by 78% to nearly afifth of the peak.The highest weekly death toll from the pandemic was 29,331, recorded on May 17-23. As expected, deaths peaked two weeks after the highest number of cases had been recorded. While daily deaths have continued to drop steadily since the peak, backlog fatalities have pushed up the weekly numbers over the past two weeks.
On Sunday, India recorded 69,061 fresh infections, with data from Assam yet to come in till past midnight. The death toll was 1,590. On Saturday, the country had reported 80,627 new cases.