Coronavirus;India records World’s highest Covid-19 Related Deaths After Court Judgement

Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, revised its death toll after being directed to by Patna High Court.

The court has been hearing a petition alleging that the number of deaths in the state has been under-reported and inconsistent during the country’s second wave of COVID-19.

It announced a further 6,148 fatalities on Thursday – after the state of Bihar discovered 3,929 unreported deaths.

As a result, India now has recorded the world’s highest number of coronavirus-related deaths in a single day.

See also India; Fear of Covid -19 Vaccine Rocks Villages.

“All facts must be verified from all sources,” the court’s chief justice said.

Mangal Panday, Bihar’s health minister, said: “We are open to revising the figures if people come forward with genuine papers. Our real intention is to help and not to hide anything. We are not ruling out some names that are still missing.”

There have been allegations that India under-reported deaths in April and May when it was hit by a severe second wave of infections.

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Reports from Skynews alleged in April that there were huge discrepancies in the actual numbers of Covid-19 related deaths,q compared with those given by the authorities.

According to the report,one of the reasons is that the large number of deaths happened in people’s homes and not in hospitals (which were filled beyond capacity).

Deaths outside medical facilities do not appear to have been tallied in government figures.

The Delta variant of COVID-19 – first discovered in India – has spread into rural areas. Many deaths have happened in villages and small towns where public health facilities are inadequate or virtually non-existent.

Sky News said they found hundreds of teachers in Uttar Pradesh died within a few days of being put on election duty.

There are also reports and videos of hundreds of unaccounted shallow graves along the banks of the river Ganges.

India is the second worst-affected country after the United States, having recorded more than 29 million COVID cases, while more than 360,000 people have died.

The vaccination drive which began on 16 January has been slow and mired in controversy, with not enough doses being produced.

India has administered more than 235 million shots so far – less than 5% of the estimated adult population of 950 million has been fully vaccinated.

Those who have only been jabbed once amount to 14% of the population.

Principal scientific adviser K. VijayRaghavan has warned that a third wave of infections is “inevitable”.