A new analysis by the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme, which functions under the aegis of India’s Health Ministry, has found that only 57 percent of Covid19 deaths in India were associated with comorbidities, The Print reported.
This report analyzed 17,834 Covid19 deaths recorded in India until July 2. Earlier, in May, the Health Ministry had analyzed the 3,435 Covid19 deaths till then, and found that as many as 73 percent of the deaths involved people with comorbidities. This also corresponded to data coming in from New York, China, and Italy about most Covid19 deaths being linked to comorbidities. But, as Covid19 spreads through the country, data is diverging from some of the previously reported trends.
Similarly, the current study has also found that almost half of the deceased patients were under the age of 60. When the outbreak began, global trends had suggested that the the risk factor increased with age — urging the elderly population to stay indoors, and avoid contact with outsiders. The new report undercut the previous assumptions about younger, healthier people being safer from more serious cases of Covid19.
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As the pandemic is expanding, analyzing Covid19-related data at regular intervals aids our understanding of how the pandemic is evolving. At the same time, it is increasingly important to view specific trends within countries or regions, because Covid19 infections have developed differently across the world.
“Every epidemic is local. So, a combination of local leadership, local data to track what is happening, and a local army of community health workers and volunteers is absolutely critical to get it under control,” Dr. Madhukar Pai, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Canada, said to The Economist.
And, as Dr. Pai told The Economist, in countries as large as India, the success rates of different places in tackling Covid19 will vary. It’s probably also time to start compiling more state-specific, or region-specfic, data to understand trends better, and emerge from the crisis sooner.
