TIRUPATI: Confusion prevails among public over Covid-19 death numbers in the Chittoor district as there are huge differences between the number of deaths in the daily bulletin put out by the government and the actual deaths in the district.
Public express doubts that more people would have succumbed to the deadly virus than the number given in the bulletin. A close observation of the daily death toll raises doubts that many are not being reported in the bulletin put out by the state government.
For instance, on Saturday the official bulletin said that only eight people succumbed to the disease in the district during the 24 hours ending at 9 am on Saturday. However, a report from SVR Ruia Government General Hospital in Tirupati mentions 21 deaths during the same period.
Likewise, the state bulletin released on May 11 showed 18 deaths, while the reports from Ruia showed 47 on the same day. On May 12, the bulletin showed 8 deaths as against 24 at Ruia. May 13 bulletin reported 9 deaths as against 20 at Ruia. On the following day, the toll was 8 on the bulletin as against 27 at Ruia. If one counts deaths at other Covid hospitals, both government and private, and also those in home quarantine, the number will be much higher.
However, when questioned about the discrepancies in the data, officials said that many of those succumbing to the virus at Ruia hospital belong to other districts and that the death count would be added to their respective districts. They also claimed that a number of deaths in Ruia’s report were not due to Covid.
It may be mentioned here that the government will put every Covid-19 patient on an official tracking system – irrespective of their admission into government or private hospitals or quarantine centres or home quarantine. It is obvious that any Covid death reported will come under the radar of the State's tracking system.
Meanwhile, the district continued to record a high number of Covid cases. There were 2,884 fresh positive cases in the last 24 hours. The total number of active cases in the district as of Saturday was 22,916, which took the total cases recorded till date in the district to 1,54,052. As many as 1,30,052 people recovered and were discharged, while 1,084 succumbed to the virus till date, as per the official bulletin.
