LUCKNOW: The number of Covid-19 deaths in the second wave of pandemic has gone up by 7.5% in the last few days with the addition of 106 casualties that occurred between April 1 and May 31 but were not updated by the hospitals on health department’s Covid portal.
These ‘uncounted’ deaths came to the fore in the last 11 days when the office of the chief medical officer (CMO) asked the hospitals –designated as Covid facilities during the surge in April-May – to conduct an audit of their manual records and update the data on the portal.
The process to update the records on the portal started on June 15.
Since then, 106 casualties have been reported from about a dozen hospitals, both government and private.
These hospitals include Balrampur Hospital, DRDO Covid facility and a prominent private hospital on Kanpur road, among others.
The most devastating period of the second wave was from April 1 to May 31 when about 1,226 patients died, according to the estimates based on state covid bulletins issued daily.
Now, after the audit, it has been revealed that during this two-month period at least 106 (8.6%) more deaths took place in addition to 1,226 fatalities in Covid hospitals.
As a result, overall casualties since the start of the second wave from March 15 till June 26 (Saturday), has reached 1,429.
These 106 ‘backlog’ deaths account for around 7.5% of the total toll.
In April, when the daily cases were very high, many patients died for the want of oxygen-supported beds in hospitals overwhelmed by the surge.
Some patients also succumbed while in home isolation as they could not get oxygen cylinders on time.
These causalities have not been counted in the overall toll so far.
Health officers said it was the duty of the hospitals to feed the data of deaths in real time.
These deaths were recorded manually in the hospital register but not uploaded on the portal then, apparently because of untrained staff and workload.
Officers said they would also include deaths that occured in home isolation if reported by the families of Covid victims.
CMO Dr Sanjay Bhatnagar said, “Every hospital has been given a user ID and password for the portal to update details of patient admissions and deaths in real-time.
However, some hospitals have updated data now when we asked them to conduct an audit.” Director, Balarampur Hospital, Dr SK Pandey said, “The records of the deaths and admissions are duly communicated to the CMO office daily and it has to upload them on the portal.” Similarly, officials managing DRDO hospital said they had given soft copies as well as hard copies of all the records to the CMO office to feed the data on the portal.