The Union health ministry on Thursday said it had received 131 compensation claims from families of healthcare workers who had died on coronavirus duty, putting for the first time a figure on the casualties among such staff.

A senior health official said the Centre had already paid or processed 84 claims while the other 47 were under process. The largest numbers of claims have come from Maharashtra, Delhi and Telangana, said Rajesh Bhushan, officer on special duty in the health ministry.

The Centre had earlier this year announced a special insurance scheme with a provision of Rs 50 lakh compensation for all healthcare workers, such as ward staff, nurses, paramedics, technicians, doctors and specialists. The Covid-specific scheme covers around 22 lakh healthcare workers in all government health centres and hospitals, whether run by the Centre or the states.

Anecdotal accounts of healthcare workers, including nurses and doctors, dying after falling sick with Covid-19 have emerged from multiple places across India but the health ministry had not indicated any figures until now.

As early as April, a non-government network of physicians had estimated that around 50 doctors had been infected by the coronavirus. Infections among doctors and nurses had been reported from Delhi, Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, among others.

One hundred and thirty-one deaths is a significant number, Mahesh Devnani, an associate professor of hospital administration at the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, posted on Twitter. “Which other infectious disease (has) had such (a) toll on healthcare workers in India?”

A senior physician who requested not to be named said it was clear from the trends in other countries that healthcare workers in India too would be at relatively high risk of Covid-19. But healthcare workers appear to also have picked up the infection outside of Covid-19 wards.

“We have anecdotal accounts of doctors and other healthcare workers adopting precautions with personal protective equipment inside hospitals, but getting infected with the coronavirus,” said the physician, who works in a central government hospital.

A study published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research in May had revealed that 1,073 healthcare workers had developed Covid-19 during April and May. Health experts suspect the number has increased significantly along with the growth of India’s epidemic.

India’s daily count of new Covid-19 cases crossed 50,000 for the first time on Thursday — the 52,123 new cases raising the total number of cases to 1,583,792, of whom 528,242 are under medical supervision, 1,020,582 have recovered and 34,968 have died.