8.7k ‘reconciliation deaths’ since May 1 push up fatalities in Maha

MUMBAI: Since May 1, Maharashtra has added almost 9,000 deaths from Covid-19 under the category of ”reconciliation deaths”, which has pushed the total fatality to 100,000 in the state, government data shows. The discrepancy that’s being corrected, though, has simply to do with delayed reporting rather than underreporting or misreporting of deaths.

Public health experts say two things can explain this. First, the time-consuming process of factbased categorisation of deaths as Covid and non-Covid as per rules laid down by the Indian Council of Medical Research.

Second, the shortage of manpower and other resources during the more infectious and deadly second wave of the pandemic that led to delays in updating data on the centralised portal. Going by data provided by the state health department, between May 1 and June 7, as many as 22,099 deaths were recorded in the state of which 8,756 were added after reconciliation. Majority of the reconciliations have been from rural parts of the state such as Satara, Sangli, Aurangabad, Solapur, Ahmednagar, Bhandara, and Wardha.

Here’s how the numbers add up. On Tuesday, for instance, Maharashtra reported a total of 661 deaths. Of this, 208 occurred in the previous 48 hours and 87 in the previous week. The rest, according to the state public health department’s daily press release were deaths that occurred even earlier in various districts and corporations.

Categorisation of deaths takes time

Last year, ICMR issued guidelines based on the parameters provided by the World Health Organization to categorise deaths into Covid and non-Covid.

Dr Avinash Supe, chairman of the state’s death audit committee, said, “Just because a patient has been diagnosed with Covid-19, it doesn’t mean that the cause of death is the infection. If a patient has severe comorbidities such as chronic kidney disease, we have to check all medical reports of the patient before declaring it as a Covid-19 death. We have to categorise such deaths by following the scientific parameters. This process often takes between six and eight days.”

Delay in data upgrade on centralised portal

With the outbreak of the second wave in the middle of February, hospitals were overwhelmed with a large inflow of Covid-19 patients. As a result, timely uploading of data on the centralised portal took a backseat.

“...during the peak of the pandemic, all hands were on deck. So, there have been delays in data updating,” said Dr Pradeep Awate, state surveillance officer.