COVID deaths are much higher than earlier reported: Bihar Govt under attack

Patna: Following a recent direction by the Patna High Court, the Bihar government on Wednesday recounted its COVID-19 death toll, which has jumped by a whopping 72.84%.

The latest data presented by the Bihar government on Covid deaths in the state has now triggered a major controversy and has put the Centre into an uneasy situation after massive discrepancies were found in the data.

The data which was put out on Wednesday evening reveals 3,951 more deaths compared to a day before. The total number of deaths till Tuesday due to Covid in Bihar was 5,458. However, the health department of Bihar has now reported 9,429 more deaths due to the coronavirus.

The sudden spike in death number has affected the central all India tally which suddenly jumped to 6,148. A Division Bench of the Patna High Court had in May slammed the Bihar government and expressed concern over inconsistencies in the toll in Buxar district, presented by two top government officials in two separate affidavits.

The court had asked the government to verify all facts before placing them on record. The state health department which gave the breakup of deaths in all its 38 districts has not mentioned dates and time or when these deaths occurred.

Patna has registered 2,303 deaths which are the highest in the state followed by Muzaffarpur (609) and Begusarai (316).

Following outrage and mismatch reported, a senior officer of the health department said that the matter is under investigation. The detailed report is expected to come later in the evening.

The health department has also issued mismatch data about the numbers of patients recovered. On Tuesday, it presented 7,01,234 recoveries from the Covid infection while it published 6,98,397 recoveries, a day later. The recovery rate on Tuesday was shown at 98.7 per cent while on Wednesday it was 97.65 per cent.

The Bihar government is facing flack from opposition leaders for presenting such data mismatch. Jan Adhikar Party (JAP) has slammed the Bihar government accusing it of a corona death scam. "Who is making death scam in Bihar. Nitish Kumar government should answer it," JAP released a written statement on Thursday.

Our leader Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav has pointed out that the Bihar government is hiding the number of deaths. He further pointed out that there were 1,000 deaths per day in April and May this year," Said Raju Danvir, national youth wing president of JAP.