Counting the dead, telling the truth

It was the second week of April and Kerala had just reported its third Covid-19 death. Mahroof, a 71-year-old, who resided a stone's throw away from the Kerala border in Mahe, died while being treated at a hospital in Kannur. It's a death that the state is yet to add to its tally.
The adamance of the state government, which denied appeals by Mahroof’s kin to record it as a Covid-19 death, led Dr Arun N M, a general practitioner based in Palakkad, to track the undercounting of Covid-19 deaths by tracking newspaper obituaries.
The count led by Dr Arun and a handful of volunteers stood at 4,288, as on December 12, much above the state's official toll of 2,990, as on Tuesday.
Day after day, they would crawl district editions of newspapers, YouTube uploads of TV channels and do endless Google searches, slowly building a credible database. “In December, our work was affected due to a host of reasons, including newspapers slackening their reporting of deaths,” says Dr Arun.
In June, the official toll for Kerala was 14, one up than the unofficial figure because the state bizarrely insisted on counting the death of a person who died by suicide. The unaccounted deaths began to spiral in mid-July when the state changed its policy, surreptitiously.
The official government dashboard specified why certain deaths are not being counted, mentioning comorbidities but this too was done away, when comparison to international protocols were drawn. By July-end, the unofficial toll had climbed to 105 against the state tally of 62.
“We did everything right from insisting on masks, break-the-chain campaign and testing and tracing but somewhere in between we stopped listening to science and recklessly allowed it to be mixed with politics,” says Dr Arun.