Fudging Covid Toll Doesn’t Help Anyone, Least Of All Odisha Govt !

One does not have to be a grave-digger to know that the current official death toll in Odisha is a gross understatement and the actual number of deaths is several times higher.

Fudging Covid Toll Doesn’t Help Anyone, Least Of All Odisha Govt !

News Summary

A reply to an RTI query revealed that no less than 3480 people who died of Covid-19 were cremated at the Satya Nagar crematorium in Bhubaneswar alone by the end of December last year.

The fact that many of the deceased had been admitted with co-morbidities certainly helped the government.

With the launch of the Ashirvad scheme, there is now a scramble for ‘death due to Covid’ certificates.

It is meant to be a ‘joke’. But there is nothing even remotely comic about it. Instead, it serves as a grim reminder of what has been the subject of animated discussion across the state for months now, but something the state government is hell bent on pushing under the carpet: the actual death toll due to Covid-19.

So, here it goes. A doctor goes around a battlefield after a bloody war inspecting the dead and the injured and tying a tag saying ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ as the case may be so that the dead could be taken for cremation and the injured shifted to the hospital for treatment. As is only natural, those injured are shifted first before a team comes to shift the dead to the cremation/burial ground. As one member of the team lifts the body of one person tagged ‘dead’ by the doctor, the ‘dead’ man miraculously groans indistinctly; “I am alive.” But the member of the clearing team would have none of it. “Shut up. Do you know more than the doctor?” he growls before shoving the ‘body’ on to the vehicle for shifting to the cremation ground!!