The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Monday directed Kerala to resume daily updation of COVID-19 figures.
Erratic updation, the Centre said, had skewed the status of India's key COVID monitoring indicators.
Kerala had officially stopped giving out daily figures from April 11 and had temporarily halted the sharing of these daily statistics even with the Centre.
Kerala had not shared daily COVID-19 numbers with the Centre from April 13 to 17, for four days. It was on Monday that it restarted sharing figures.
But the Monday figure included all the reported cases and deaths of the previous four days. This caused a sudden spike in national COVID-19 numbers.
On April 13, when Kerala last sent daily figures to the Centre, the number of new cases was 298. And then, when it shared the figures with the Centre on April 18, the daily cases jumped to 940.
This caused the daily national COVID numbers on April 18 to jump to 2,183 from 1,150 on April 17, an over 90 per cent increase. This also meant a 165 per cent increase in positivity in a single day.
The daily death tally also showed a major anomaly.
On April 18, Kerala reported that there were 213 deaths. These deaths did not happen on a single day but had happened during the previous months but were officially recognised as COVID deaths in the last few days on the basis of the new guidelines issued by the Centre for reporting COVID deaths.
But the problem was, this led to an over 530 per cent increase in daily deaths on April 18; from four deaths on April 17 to 214 deaths on April 18.
In other words, as Ministry of Health and Family Welfare joint secretary Lav Agarwal wrote to Kerala's health principal secretary Dr Rajan N Khobragade on April 18, "This has impacted and skewed the status of India's key monitoring indicators like cases, deaths and positivity."
The Ministry also sought to drive home the importance of daily updation of COVID numbers. "Daily and diligent reporting of data is critical to arrive at a meaningful understanding of the pandemic in the districts, state and national level and ensure that any anomalies, surge or emerging trends can be captured in a timely manner," the joint secretary wrote.
"This is especially relevant as it is a highly infectious disease and also has an associated risk of emergence of new variants," he added.
It was last Monday, April 11, that the Kerala government announced that it will no longer publish the daily COVID-19 report.
When the figures were last published, on April 10, 223 new COVID-19 cases were reported. The test positivity rate (TPR) then was near 2 per cent.
It was only three months ago that the state reported its highest-ever COVID-19 cases in a day - 55,475 new cases on January 25.
The TPR in January was hovering over the 40 per cent mark. The fall in cases since had been swift and dramatic.
The state government's announcement last week was largely taken as an unofficial declaration that the COVID-19 threat has blown over.
A week prior, on April 5, it had also stopped updating the COVID-19 daily bulletin on its website.
