"No Comment On Under-Reporting": Supreme Court On Gujarat Covid Deaths

Under-reporting of Covid deaths may or may not have happened and the only concern now is ensuring that compensations are paid to the maximum number of families who suffered, the Supreme Court said today after Gujarat complained that the media has "misreported" the issue. Gujarat had, in a way, admitted 10,000 more Covid deaths yesterday in its data submitted to the court on compensation paid to the families who lost a loved one to the pandemic, which made headlines.  

It was reported on Monday that the official data on deaths in Gujarat was 10,098 but compensation was paid out for 19,964 deaths. If these figures were to be counted as Gujarat's Covid deaths, the countrywide fatality figures would go up by two per cent.

The Gujarat government today told the court that it has received a total of 40,467 applications so far, of which 26,836 applications have been approved and 23,848 families have been paid compensation. Gujarat's Covid deaths stand at 10,100 as of today.

Gujarat told the court that the media had interpreted the discrepancy in numbers as a case of "under-reporting" of Covid deaths. "For compensation, the scope of Covid deaths criteria is much wider than usual ICMR guidelines for counting Covid deaths," the state had pointed out.

"There may or may not be under-reporting of deaths. We are not here to say that. But 10,000 deaths and a much larger number of applications submitted -- so the common man will think that," said Justice MR Shah, who was part of a two-judge bench hearing a petition on delays in payment of compensation.

"We don't want to comment on the controversy. We are here to only see that the governments work... We just want to ensure that more and more people get the benefit," he said.

"As a welfare state, nobody should worry if number of applications will increase," Justice Shah said, adding, "Except a few classes which have their own agenda who are concerned with whether there was under-reporting or not.. we are not concerned".

For purposes of compensation, anyone dying within 30 days of testing positive for Covid is counted as Covid death, no matter what the immediate cause of death was. Even suicide by a Covid-positive person will be counted as a Covid death.

This is different from the rules of official data compilation for Covid, where the time frame is 25 days and suicides are not counted as Covid deaths.

The time frame was extended and tweaks were made in the rules after orders from the Supreme Court, which wanted the benefit of compensation to reach more people.