The Centre on Sunday advised the Supreme Court that those who perished with Covid-19 disease are certified as”passing because of Covid” no matter their co-morbidities they taken.
Reacting to petitions alleging that authorities weren’t certifying Covid-caused deaths to prevent liability for payment of ex gratia beneath the Disaster Management Act, the Centre stated in an affidavit,”All deaths having a diagnosis of Covid-19, regardless of co-morbidities, should be categorized as deaths because of Covid-19.
The one exception may be where there’s an alternate source of death, which can not be credited to Covid (eg accidental injury, poisoning, severe myocardial infarction etc), in which Covid-19 is an incidental finding.” It stated’passing certification’ must be performed for record deaths according to regulations approved by the Registrar General of India.
The principal objective of certificate of cause of death (death certificate) would be to identify and properly classify all of deaths because of a medical illness (eg Covid-19) and to remove some discrepancy in coding in order to get accurate estimates of the load of all Covid deaths,” it said.
‘Death audit’,” on the flip side, has been a practice to identify differences which lead to deaths of individuals, the Centre explained.
The goal was to increase quality of health care services by corrective steps into prevent/minimise long term deaths.