Excess deaths in Tamil Nadu over four times official COVID-19 tally

But undercount is lower than that of Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.

The number of “excess deaths” registered by the Civil Registration System (CRS) in Tamil Nadu ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit (from April 2020 to May 2021) is 6.2 times the official reported figure of 24,232 deaths. But in data accessed by The Hindu, the CRS recorded the number of deaths due to COVID-19 as 35,807 (14,652 in 2020 and 21,155 till May 2021), possibly adjusted over the months, an increase of nearly 47% in the deaths reported in the State health bulletin. After omitting deaths due to causal factors unrelated to COVID-19, it is estimated that there were 1,61,581 excess deaths amounting to an undercount factor of 4.5 for the pandemic period — April 2020 to May 2021. In the second wave (April and May 2021) alone, the CRS registered 20,158 COVID-19 deaths, but we found that this was undercounted by a factor of 3, as the estimated excess deaths for this period were 60,773. The undercount factor for 2021 was 3.7.