May seem different, but they died of the same cause.

"The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that the Centre must pay compensation to the family of those who succumbed to Covid-19, but said the amount of compensation will be decided by the government," India Today. Few days ago, the Centre had told the Supreme Court that Rs 4 lakh (Rs 400,000) compensation cannot be paid to all those who died due to Covid-19 as it would exhaust the disaster relief funds." "Even at Rs 4 lakh each for almost 400,000 homes, going by India's official covid toll so far, its fiscal bill would work out to under Rs 16,000 crore (Rs 160 billion), which is just a fraction of its other outlays for pandemic aid," wrote an editorial in the Mint. "Our current total is very probably an undercount, with some states showing mortality denial even in the face of nameless bodies spotted at random, but the scale of it is hard to estimate." And that is what will make this compassion so unfair. Officially, India has registered 30.5 million cases of Covid infections of which 401,068 have died, worldometer. "India's true coronavirus death toll could closer to 2 million compared to the official 395,000 fatalities reported, experts warned," Daily Mail. Which means, a large number of families will not receive any help because they have not been counted. At today's prices, Rs 400,000 will not last very long if the earning member of a family has died. What happens to children who have lost both parents? "Over 2,000 children in Delhi have lost either one or both their parents to COVID-19, with 67 of them losing both their parents, since the pandemic outbreak in March last year, says a survey conducted by the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights of DCPCR," NDTV. Since children have no knowledge of investment and banking the compensation money could be stolen. But it is not just those who were proved to have been infected with the coronavirus. Various state governments blocked hospital beds for Covid patients only. "The number of COVID-19-designated hospital beds at Delhi government run hospitals has been increased from 6,000 to 13,000, Health Minister Satyendra Jain said on April 14," moneycontrol. In April, "Two days after designating 14 big private hospitals as dedicated to Covid, the Delhi government on Wednesday revised its order allowing the hospitals to use 10%-30% of their beds to provide emergency care as well as follow-up treatment to some of their patients," Hindustan Times (HT). "Only two hospitals, Max Smart Superspeciality hospital and Manipal hospital, remained completely Covid-19 centres after the order, which reduced the number of beds accrued from 4,337 beds to 3,553." India has just 5 beds for every 10,000 Indians. The just released Human Development Report 2020 showed that out of 167 countries, India would rank 155th on bed availability," Times of India (TOI). "Countries in the 'very high human development' category typically have 25-50 doctors per 10,000 and 25-35 beds per 10,000." We have 5 hospital beds and just 8.6 doctors per 10,000 people. "So far, 798 doctors have died in the second wave of the pandemic, according to the registry by the Indian Medical Association, shooting past the toll of 748 recorded during the first wave," HT. When the second wave struck the nation was completely unprepared and there was a desperate scramble for beds and oxygen, BBC, with patients dying outside hospitals. Blocking of beds by governments and the death of at least 1546 doctors would mean that tens of thousands of patients with heart disease, strokes, diabetes, tuberculosis, cancer, renal failure and many other serious diseases would have died without medical help due to scarcity of doctors, hospital and ICU beds. These patients may not have been infected with the virus but they died as a result of the pandemic, just as those who died of the virus infection. A clearer picture could be obtained from all-cause mortality numbers but states are not releasing those numbers. Only Kerala "released all-cause mortality data with the claim that contrary to all assumptions of deaths in the state going up due to the impact of Covid-19, the total number of deaths in 2020 went down by more than 11% in comparison with 2019," ORF. The Supreme Court means well but won't it be grossly unfair to compensate just a small selection of people? Perhaps, the Court should order all governments to release correct data. Honesty: is it asking for too much?