The number of Covid deaths in Bengal has not dropped, unlike the daily new infection count, prompting the government to plan to treat patients incidentally diagnosed with Covid at general hospitals, instead of transferring them to dedicated Covid centres.
Health department sources said the government felt that the number of Covid deaths could be brought down if patients being diagnosed with the disease were not indiscriminately referred to hospitals that treat only Covid patients.
Most of the recent deaths of Covid patients were caused by other illnesses such as cardiac disorder, chronic kidney disease or cancer.
Dedicated Covid hospitals, the sources said, lack resources to treat these diseases, which are the primary illnesses for most Covid patients.
A critical care expert said a review of the Covid deaths in Bengal between January 15 and 25 by the health department found that only one person passed away because of Covid.
All the other patients had serious comorbidities such as cancer, chronic kidney disease or a cardiac illness.
Doctors at both private and government hospitals said they had noticed that most of these patients came to hospital with other illnesses and tested positive for Covid only during the routine pre-admission screening.
“Most of the deaths being reported now are incidental Covid deaths. The patients were admitted to hospital with other primary illnesses. They had not come to the hospital with symptoms of Covid. They tested positive for Covid at the hospital,” said Abhijit Chowdhury, a public health specialist and member of the state government’s Covid task force.
“It is now time to drop the idea of having separate Covid hospitals. All hospitals or all departments in a hospital should have a Covid isolation facility. A patient will be treated for the primary illness and Covid, which is incidental, simultaneously.”
The state health department has started mulling ways to implement the step, said officials aware of the developments.
Some of the dedicated Covid hospitals in the city include Sambhunath Pandit Hospital, MR Bangur Hospital and the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Beleghata.
Chandramouli Bhattacharya, an infectious diseases expert at Peerless Hospital, said he had rarely come across any patient in the hospital’s critical care unit during the third wave who was in need of critical care only because of Covid.
“Covid alone causing someone’s death is rare (in the third wave). Those who died were suffering from other diseases. It seems Covid was an incidental finding in these people,” said Bhattacharya.
The state government had set up a committee during the first wave of Covid pandemic in 2020 to ascertain how many of the Covid deaths were primarily because of Covid and in how many persons other comorbidities turned out to be the primary factor.
In the third wave, Bhattacharya said, comorbidities were the reasons for the overwhelming majority of deaths.
Saurabh Maji, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist at the RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences, too, had a similar view.
“The classical case of someone testing positive for Covid and having their lungs impacted severely has been very rare in this wave, almost none,” he said.
According to the state health department’s daily Covid bulletin, 34 Covid patients died in Bengal on Sunday. Fourteen of them were from Kolkata.
On Saturday, the corresponding figures were 31 and eight, respectively.
On Sunday, 835 new Covid cases were detected in Bengal and 108 in Kolkata. On Saturday, 1,345 new Covid cases were detected in Bengal and 159 in Kolkata.
