JOIN USRate of people dying at home in Karnataka goes up during third wave
The generally mild third wave has not been without its share of fatalities and this has prompted one trait of the second wave to make a comeback: deaths at home.
Since the start of the month till January 24, as many as 309 Covid-19 fatalities were made public, out of which 25 were people who died while at home or were brought dead to hospitals. All but eight of these fatalities were in districts other than Bengaluru Urban.
These fatalities represent 8.09 per cent of total deaths, which is closing in on the home death rate of 8.32 per cent recorded during May 2021, in the second wave.
This suggests the public is once again delaying diagnosis or treatment of the disease. Six of the most recent deaths at home were people (all aged 62 and above) who had been fully vaccinated, as per official information.
In Bengaluru Urban, Special Commissioner (Health), Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Dr Thrilok Chandra said “most of these fatalities were people who had never been diagnosed with Covid-19” when they were alive. “Many of them died of another health condition and were found to be positive for Covid-19 later. These fatalities are ‘incidental’ in nature,” he added.
Many of the deceased were senior citizens. A further six were aged between 41 and 59. Four were aged 40 or younger. One was a child in Bagalkot whose death appears to be an archetypal example of late hospital presentation.
Dr Jayashree Yemmi, the District Health Officer said the six-year-old girl child was brought to Dhanush hospital in the district when she was already severely symptomatic with pneumonia.
“Because she had classic Covid-19 symptoms of the Delta variant, we subjected her to testing and the RT-PCR result came back as positive. She did not have any recorded comorbidities. We immediately moved her to the ICU at the district hospital. The parents, however, took the child back home on January 20 against our medical advice. She died at home later that night,” Dr Jayashree said.
There is a little inkling of which variant of the novel coronavirus is causing the deaths. Samples from “incidental” fatalities are not sent for genomic sequencing, according to Dr Chandra, although he specified that samples from ICU cases are.
But data from the Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) provides a clue: out of 400-odd Omicron cases from January studied, none went into the ICU. If hospitalization was required, they were restricted to general or HDU beds. However, of the 40 to 50 Delta cases studied, two had required ICU beds. The rest were likely placed in home isolation.
This has implications because Omicron cases appear to now dominate in the state. As per official data from the Department of Health and Family Welfare the state had 479 Omicron cases on January 14, comprising 9.40 per cent of total genomic data since the start of the pandemic. By January 24, this share had climbed to 931 cases or 16.67 per cent.
In contrast, the share of Delta cases dropped from 57.69 per cent to 52.93 per cent (only 56 new cases were reported between January 14 and 24), while Delta sublineages dropped from 26.51 per cent to 24.57 per cent (only 22 new cases were reported).
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