The ‘Kerala Model’ is all about fudging Covid death figures, said BJP leader Amit Malviya after an RTI data showed striking disparities between the death registration figures at local bodies and the health department’s figures of Covid deaths.
“The #KeralaModel is all about fudging Covid death figures, it seems. Between March and May, Kerala put the official death toll during the second wave around 4,500. But the registration figures put the number for three months at 12,560, nearly three times! (sic),” Malviya tweeted.
According to a report in Times of India, when registration figures showed that April and May recorded 1,554 and 10,602 Covid deaths respectively in Kerala; the health department’s figures for the corresponding periods were 687 and 3,507 respectively.
The report quoted an RTI data on Covid deaths that showed death registrations in local bodies in Kerala picked up at an alarming pace during the second wave, going from 404 Covid deaths a month to over 10,000 death registrations in May. It said that the peak was astronomical, over 2,000% in three months, while the official data of the health department showed that the situation was pretty much under control.
Between April and May the caseload had more than doubled from 4 lakh to 9 lakh. The health department, overwhelmed by the uncontrollable surge, almost lost the count of people who died of Covid-19, which reflects in the difference of 7,095 deaths between the registration figures and health department’s official data, the TOI report stated.
The severity of fatalities in May, as shown in registration figures, was such that more than 30% of total death registrations in 10 districts in May was because of Covid-19. Palakkad accounts for the highest percentage of Covid death registrations in May. As much as 41% of total death registrations in Palakkad in May were Covid deaths, followed by Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam with 40% Covid death registrations.
Meanwhile, Kerala Health Minister Veena George told ANI that the state was following the guidelines of WHO and ICMR. “We had conducted a COVID death analysis after the first wave and found out that our numbers were almost correct. We have made it more transparent by doing real-time entry,” she said.
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