Data discrepancies mar fight against Covid-19 in India

On Sept. 24, ICMR reported 14,92,409 tests, but a compilation of test data from all states and UTs gives a figure of 12,16,516 – a gap of more than 2.75 lakh tests

Even after ten months, data discrepancies still mar India’s fight against Covid-19, putting a question mark on the accuracy of many official claims on how the country is coping up with the outbreak.

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No doubt the number of tests is on the rise with 2074 laboratories from a lone one in March. But a random comparison in September and October showed a gap of 2-2.5 lakh tests in the state and central data.

On Sept. 24, ICMR reported 14,92,409 tests but a compilation of test data from all the states and Union Territories, gives a figure of 12,16,516 – a gap of more than 2.75 lakh tests. Such gaps are 1.13 lakh on September 27 and 1.86 lakh plus on Sept 30.

The difference is 1.88 lakh on October 5 and 2.38 lakh on Oct 21. It dropped to 53,000 plus on October 6 and 48,000 on November 4, but rose to 2.55 lakh on October 22, according to a table prepared by Ayan Banerjee, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, Kolkata.

Testing is just one example. Sources in the Union Health Ministry told DH that many states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand regularly reconciled their Covid-19 death data to plug the gaps in the reporting system.

For instance on Oct 18, Maharashtra reported 463 Covid-19 deaths in the previous 24 hours – way above its daily figures of 100 plus deaths. On the same day, the hill state of Uttarakhand reported 95 deaths all of a sudden. Both were cases of reconciliation, sources said.

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Again on November 5, Maharashtra reported 300 deaths in a single day, out of which only 112 were reported in the previous 24 hours. The remaining 188 deaths were those that happened in Pune in the last two weeks but escaped the official reporting system.

After West Bengal reported 4,000 plus new cases for several days in the last week of October, the number of such cases dropped to 3,900 in each of the next 13 days notwithstanding the crowd seen during the Durga Puja festivities. The daily toll on each of the last two weeks varies between 54 and 64.

The data from Bihar is also suspect. Bihar alone has done more than one crore Covid-19 tests so far (10% of India's total tests) and still kept its test positive rate less than 5% for over two months. The decline is remarkable for a resource poor state! Surprisingly each of the 38 districts in Bihar without any exception show a declining trend in the epidemic after a spike in August.

"It's important to deal with evidence properly and discuss it before making policy intervention rooted in evidence,” said Shahid Jameel, senior virologist associated with the Ashoka University. But such a gap between policy and evidence clearly exists in India, noted many other researchers.