COVID: Indian states recount death toll amid criticism

Two states in India have begun revising up their official COVID death tolls,after Indian central authorities and state high courts intervened in recent weeks, following intense national and international scrutiny of India's COVID death toll.

The total death toll currently stands at over 391,000, making it the third-highest worldwide. But critics estimate that the true number of COVID victims in the country is much higher.

The states amending their death tolls

The state of Maharashtra, where India's largest metropolis of Mumbai is situated, launched an investigation in mid-May, adding over 10,000 COVID deaths as of June 11.

The eastern state of Bihar, which made headlines after dead bodies washed up on the banks of the Ganges river, added nearly 4,000 deaths in a single day on June 9.

While the northern states of Rajasthan and Uttarakhand have just begun audits, Uttar Pradesh, which has also come under repeated fire for covering up COVID deaths, has yet to launch an official investigation.

'No question of hiding statistics,' says official

Rajesh Tope, the health minister of Maharashtra, tweeted that the state government was working transparently and there was "no question of hiding statistics." He added that information related to COVID deaths was pending solely due to "technical difficulties."

Pratyaya Amrit, a senior health secretary Bihar state, said the rise was due to deaths of people who died at private hospitals, under home isolation, or post-COVID complications.

Following the revision of numbers, India's central health ministry asked each of the governments to conduct the recounting audit "properly."

The central authority defended India against an article published in English-language news magazine The Economist reporting that India's true COVID death toll could be five to seven times higher as "speculative."

Poor data collection is an issue, experts say

Epidemiologists largely agree that poor quality of data has been a major barrier to tracking deaths during second wave of COVID in India.

Dr Swapneil Parikh, the author of The Coronavirus: What you Need to Know about the Global Pandemic, told DW that one of the reasons for the low mortality data was because systems were not robust enough to aggregate data in real-time.

He added that COVID numbers could be covered up in the short term, but it was incredibly difficult to do so in the long run.

Undercounting deaths is a 'complex' problem

Murad Banaji, a mathematician who has been tracking the COVID second wave closely, explained to DW that undercounting of deaths was a complex problem.

According to Banaji, some Indian states have proven better than others in registering the deaths of people, even pre-pandemic.

For example, Bihar, a large rural state, had a bad track record in recording deaths even before the pandemic. It registered just 35% of deaths in the state in 2018. Additionally, the data from the civil registration system that records births and death, is not publicly available.

Conversely, the central state of Madhya Pradesh registered 79% of deaths in 2018. The mortality data is also largely available online, Banaji told DW.

This mortality data has been used to understand the amount of "excess deaths" caused by COVID during the pandemic period. But differing recording practices pre-pandemic means that the true amount of excess deaths cannot be accurately calculated in some states.

A further factor complicating COVID-19 death toll data in India is that many of the 'excess deaths' are yet to be officially certified.

Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, who has written widely on the pandemic, told DW that only 25% of registered deaths were medically certified to determine the cause of the death even before the pandemic.

The count goes on

Despite the difficulties, Indian citizens are determined to cut through the confusion and account for every single COVID death in the country.

Kavita Krishnan, a leading activist and the secretary of All India Progressive Women's Association, recently launched a "Count Every Death" campaign with several other organizations. Volunteers have already started independently documenting deaths in a bid to reach a true figure.