According to health officials, those 1,347 patients had “serious, significant co-morbidities” such as kidney and heart issues as well as cancer. (File)Assam on Tuesday added a backlog of 1,347 deaths to its Covid death toll, taking the state’s cumulative figure to 7,986, according to the data from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
According to state Health Department officials, the reconciled deaths date back to the first wave — between April 10, 2020 and December 15, 2020 — of the pandemic. “These 1,347 deaths had occurred during the first wave,” said a senior Health Department official. Assam maintained two lists of Covid-related deaths. “One list carried deaths directly attributed to Covid-19, and the second one was of deaths recorded due to comorbidities in Covid-positive patients,” he explained.
According to health officials, those 1,347 patients had “serious, significant co-morbidities” such as kidney and heart issues as well as cancer. “The deaths were not due to the virus, but because of the comorbidities,” said an official from the state death audit board. “The initial ICMR guidelines had said that only those who had directly died of the virus should be recorded as a Covid death, and those who died of comorbid conditions such as renal failure, or heart failure, should be recorded as non-Covid deaths,” he said.
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He added that around the time the ICMR changed the guidelines on recording Covid deaths, the state, too, changed its protocol. “Between April 10, 2020 (the first recorded death in Assam) to December 15, 2020, we followed the earlier protocol of recording only deaths attributed to Covid-19. But from December 15, we counted each and every death, including those with comorbidities, as a Covid-19 death,” he said.
According to the official, the state had officially recorded 1,003 deaths till December 2020, while an additional 1,347 were due to comorbid conditions, which were not part of the official Covid death toll. “Between December 15, 2020, and March 2, 2022, we have had 5,636 deaths. The cumulative Covid death toll now stands at 7,986,” he said.
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