Despite the constant praising by the liberal media, the Kerala model of covid containment was never a successful one in the first place. Now, suspicion of data fudging by the state government is looming large. Recently, the state government was accused of concealing the death of 7,000 covid patients in the state.
Kerala government forced to revise data
On the 8th of October, 2021, Veena George, the health minister of Kerala announced that a total of 7,000 deaths will be added to the overall tally of covid deaths in Kerala. According to her statement, these deaths were not included in official numbers because the hospitals started to upload data only after June 2021 and these deaths occurred before that.
Before the inclusion of these deaths, the official death tally in Kerala was numbered 26,072. Now, it will be revised to 33,000. The health minister also denied the opposition charge that the government deliberately kept the death number hidden from the official statistics, so that it does not dent the image of the state government. Replying to adjournment motion by the opposition in the state assembly, the minister said- “There was no deliberate attempt to exclude deaths of so many from the tally. We have been following ICMR guidelines regarding Covid-19 deaths, but due to some technical glitches, these deaths were left out. We will revise the list again.”
The revision in the death numbers will increase Kerala’s case-fatality rates by 40 percent. After the numbers are revised, Kerala’s case fatality rate will increase from 0.5 percent (lowest in the country) to about 0.7 percent against a national average of 1.5 percent. The case fatality rate is the ratio of patients who died due to a disease with respect to the number of people diagnosed with the same disease.
Kerala model to Kerala being the biggest failure
When covid-19 was at its peak during the first wave of Pandemic, Kerala was held as a model state by national and internal news portals and websites. Some institutes even conducted studies to study the model and its success. The state government took a lot of credit for their health infrastructure.
But slowly the truth started to come out. 6 months into the pandemic, Kerala was among the top-3 states to get infected by the virus. Even during the second wave of Pandemic during April-May 2021, Kerala used to be at the top of the list in terms of new infections reported on a daily basis. The positivity rates were so high in Kerala that sometimes Kerala alone used to report more than 50 percent of total positive cases in the country. While all other states were successful in flattening the curve, Kerala was a total failure in covid management.
In August this year, when all other states were freeing themselves from partial lockdowns, Kerala feared an onset of the third wave in the state with more than 100 cases being reported every day.
Vijayan failed to gauge the seriousness of covid
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s overconfidence in his state machinery was the biggest factor behind the now-defunct possible onset of the third wave.
When all states had imposed lockdowns during the second wave, the Vijayan administration decided to apply selective restrictions in the state. The same administration decided to ride over its own guidelines when it opened the state for Eid-Al-Adha to appease the Muslims. The data available on October 4 shows that Kerala is at the top in terms of active cases in the state accounting for almost half the active cases of the country.
The updating of the official death toll by the state government should be a lesson for the Kerala administration. In an era where policies are driven by statistical results, hiding statistics and that too health statistics for a temporary political advantage is a sure-shot way of losing people’s support in the long term.