Punjab: ‘77% Covid-19 victims had end-stage comorbidity’

CHANDIGARH: Nearly 77% of Covid-19 victims in Punjab had end-stage comorbidity and other contributing factors, state’s principal secretary for health Anurag Agarwal said on Thursday.
Out of 40 deaths so far, occurring mostly in patients over 50 years, 31 persons were afflicted with serious underlying illness, like end-stage kidney disease and cancer, HIV, besides uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure.
Chronic illnesses like heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and obesity were major associated illnesses which worked as contributing factors in the remaining 23% of cases, said Agarwal, while pointing out there were only handful of cases which had no underlying chronic illness.
In most cases, patients were already suffering from serious illness which might have led to mortality in natural course of events, he said. As many as 1,918 patients have already fully recovered.
Underlining scientific, systematic and aggressive contact tracing coupled with the effective enforcement of lockdown, Agarwal said doubling rate of in Punjab has been about 100 days for last few days, which was encouraging.
In all cases, where patients are found to be positive irrespective of the underlying disease, as per ICMR guidelines the death is counted as Covid-19 death, Agarwal said underlining the state’s mortality rate was significantly lower than the national average of 3%.
In many cases, samples of dead bodies have been taken some of which have turned out to be positive and all these deaths have been taken as Covid-19 death. This was done to not to miss on contact tracing of possible positive cases, Agarwal added.
Expert committee headed by Dr K K Talwar also guided the state to analyse and review the cases of deaths and take corrective action accordingly. The review of the death cases were also taken up by the expert committee in details and doctors working in the state updated.