Kerala has reported about 14,372 excess deaths between January 1 and May 31 when compared to the same period between 2015 and 2019, The News Minute reported on Wednesday, citing data from the state’s Civil Registration System.
Excess deaths is the divergence between all-cause deaths reported this year and in normal years.
Between January 1 and May 31, 2021, Kerala has officially recorded 1,13,372 deaths due to all causes. The state has reported 99,000 deaths in an average in the first five months between 2015 and 2019. When the two figures were compared, an excess of 14,372 deaths was found, reported The News Minute.
Data from Kerala’s Covid-19 bulletins showed that the state had reported 6,700 fatalities due to the disease between January 1 and May 31, 2021. This means that excess deaths this year are 2.14 times than the state’s official Covid-19 toll.
A review of the monthly break-up showed that the excess deaths in Kerala were mostly reported in May, according to The News Minute. In May 2021, the state recorded nearly 28,000 deaths. For the month of May, 2015-’19, an average of 19,600 fatalities were reported.
Kerala’s Additional Chief Secretary Sarada Muraleedharan told The News Minute that the state’s Civil Registration System was updated till May 25. “There were some discrepancies, and information lag,” she said. “But that has been taken care of.”
The Civil Registration System is a nationwide system of recording all births and deaths, led by the Office of the Registrar General of India and implemented at the state-level by state governments. The CRS is meant to record all deaths from all causes and all locations, whether they were medically certified or not.
Other states
Civil Registration System data for Madhya Pradesh accessed by Scroll.in showed that the state recorded over 1,60,000 deaths in May 2021, or nearly five times the number of reported deaths in the same month in 2018 and 2019. In all, Madhya Pradesh saw more than twice as many deaths between January 1 and May 31 this year compared to the 2018-’19 figure.
There were over 1,80,000 deaths in 2021 over the average of number of deaths in 2018 and 2019, and over 42 times the reported Covid death toll for the same period.
Twenty-four districts in Uttar Pradesh recorded 1,97,000 more deaths between July 2020 and March 2021 than in the corresponding period the previous year. The mortality rate was 110% higher than the same period the previous year. The number of deaths was 43 times higher than the official Covid-19 toll in these nine months.
In Andhra Pradesh, excess deaths were 34 times the official Covid death toll in 2021. All cause deaths were nearly five times more than normal in May, coinciding with the second wave.
Limited data available for Tamil Nadu showed a more modest increase in mortality: between January 1 and June 13, Tamil Nadu registered 129,000 excess deaths over the average, roughly 7.5 times the official reported Covid-19 toll for the same time.
In Assam, excess deaths were 30 times the official Covid death toll in August to November 2020, coinciding with the first wave.
About 82,500 excess deaths occurred in Bihar between January and May at a time when the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic caused a surge in infections and deaths in India, according to data from the state’s Civil Registration System. This has cast doubts on the state’s official data on Covid-19 deaths.
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