Official COVID-19 toll likely to go up after SC orders states to issue accurate death certificates

The official COVID-19 toll in the country is likely to go up after the Supreme Court, in its verdict announcing ex gratia for COVID victims, ordered state governments to issue correct death certificates stating the accurate cause of death. This is so that the family members of those who died due to COVID-19 don’t face any difficulty in getting the benefits of such a scheme if and when it’s declared by the government.

A bench headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan and comprising Justices Vineet Saran and MR Shah stated that if a person has died due to COVID-19 or any other complications due to COVID-19, it should be specifically mentioned in the death certificate.

The top court’s order came on PILs filed by advocates Gaurav Kumar Bansal and Reepak Kansal seeking the court's intervention for payment of Rs 4 lakh ex-gratia amount to the COVID victims' families.

States have been ordered to issue simplified guidelines for the issuance of death certificates stating ‘death due to COVID-19’. These guidelines, the Supreme Court stated, must state that if a person has died after they were found positive for COVID-19 and they have died within two to three months, either in the hospital or outside the hospital or at home, the death certificate must be issued with the cause of deaths as “Died due to COVID-19”.

The apex court observed that they have read the current guidelines for identifying COVID-19 deaths issued by ICMR, but felt that the guidelines needed to be simplified.

The Supreme Court also stated that if the family members of the deceased who died due to COVID-19 have grievances that the death certificate did not mention the exact cause of death, then they must be able to approach the appropriate authority to get the death certificate corrected.

“After the Supreme Court judgment, the death numbers will increase as now anyone with a grievance can approach an appropriate body to rectify their certificates if they have doubts. The only problem being that in rural India, several people died due to COVID-19 without either getting a COVID-19 test or before diagnosis. They are likely to be left out in this order,” explained a state health official who did not want to be identified.

As of July 1, 2020, India has reported 3,99,720 deaths, with 1,002 deaths on June 30, 2021. The fatalities crossed the 1,000 mark after three days and the official data states that there are that there are 5.2 lakh active cases in India at the moment.

Experts have observed that these numbers may represent just a fraction of the real death numbers in the country.

All over the country, states have been accused of fudging and underplaying COVID-19 death data.

"India has a poor and delayed infrastructure for reporting deaths and certifying the cause of death in general, especially in rural areas. India has not made historical mortality data and data from 2020 publicly available, making this calculation (of excess COVID-19 deaths) infeasible at this point," wrote Professor Bhramar Mukherjee, chair of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavirus-deaths.html).

On April 29, India’s Health Minister Harsh Vardhan claimed that India has one of the world’s lowest COVID-19 death rates. Gujarat, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana, Rajasthan, Orissa and West Bengal have all been accused of undercounting Covid-19 deaths.

In Gujarat, the official COVID-19 death figures are lower by as much as 20 times in some districts. According to reports, the state has seen almost 61,000 excess deaths between March 1 and May 10 compared to the same period last year.

The Delhi government has been accused of not providing “correct figures” of COVID-19 deaths. The combined records of the three Municipal Corporations of Delhi state that 4,125 cremations and burials were performed between April 19 and April 26. The Delhi government, however, recorded 2,477 COVID-19 deaths over the same period.

In Kerala, volunteers counted almost 4,000 more deaths than the official figure of 13,359. Volunteers combed through district editions of local newspapers to count the number of deaths due to COVID-19. Rajeev Sadanandan, who has been advising the Kerala government on handling the pandemic, admitted there had been "some" under-reporting of deaths.

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