Weekly Covid deaths rise 19%

After two straight weeks of decline, Covid-19 fatalities reported in India registered a 19% rise in the week ending Sunday, mainly driven up by as many as 12,573 “backlog” deaths added to the toll during this period, the highest for any seven-day span so far.

Deaths from earlier days constituted half of the over 25,000 fatalities recorded during the last seven days, raising the week's toll to the highest in three weeks.

Backlog deaths are fatalities from past days that had remained unreported due to delays by hospitals or other reasons. While acknowledgment of these deaths is a welcome exercise that would lead to a more accurate assessment of Covid casualties, only handful of states have done so as a matter ofrecord. These include Maharashtra, Bihar and Uttarakhand.

Meanwhile, fresh cases continued to decrease sharply. There were just over 6 lakh cases recorded during the week, a 30% drop from the previous seven days, when the count was over 8.6 lakh. At the height of the second wave, India had recorded more than 27.4 lakh cases in a week (May 3-9). This means, weekly cases have dropped by 78% to nearly a fifth of the peak.

The highest weekly death toll from the pandemic was 29,331, recorded on May 17-23.