Leader of the Opposition V. D. Satheesan on Thursday said under-reporting of COVID-19 deaths could deny future compensation to families that lost their breadwinners to the pandemic.
Mr. Satheesan had flagged the issue after the Supreme Court ordered the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to frame guidelines for fixing ex gratia assistance to the kin of the COVID-19 dead.
Mr. Satheesan said till recently, a State-level expert committee in the capital remotely determined whether a death in far away Wayanad was due to COVID-19 or not. Later, the government delegated the authority to district level committees.
Both decisions ran against the grain of WHO’s COVID-19 death certification guidelines. The WHO had mandated that only the doctor who had treated the patient for more than 24 hours could certify whether the person’s death was due to COVID-19 or not.
For instance, health authorities should treat cancer deaths as COVID-19 deaths if the patient had tested positive for the disease. The same was the case with patients suffering from other chronic conditions.
In Kerala, the opposite was true. Deaths that occurred after the patient turned COVID-19 negative were accounted as non-pandemic demise.
“A patient died battling post-COVID-19 complication. The family ran up a huge medical bill. They had pawned their house to meet the treatment expense. However, the authorities certified the death as non-COVID because the patient was coronavirus negative at death. The family would lose out on any future ex gratia assistance from the government. There were hundreds of such households in Kerala,” he said.
Mr. Satheesan said scores of children orphaned by the pandemic failed to get the ₹10 lakh compensation because the authorities failed to certify their parents’ death as COVID-19.
By fudging COVID-19 data and undercounting pandemic deaths, the government had hoped to present a rosy picture to the public.
However, such under-reporting would distort future medical research and attempts to understand the pandemic’s behaviour.
Mr. Satheesan demanded a complete audit of hospital deaths since the pandemic hit Kerala’s shores in 2020.
The government should publish the actual death toll, so that no bereaved family would be deprived of the pandemic assistance.
“The government could rectify the anomaly in 10 days. If not, the Opposition would take up the task,” he said.
