Comorbidities have been common factors in all the COVID-19 deaths that the State has seen so far.
Except for one person aged 55 from Kalaburagi, who died on Monday at ESIC hospital there, all the others are aged above 60. While the Kalaburagi case too had been diagnosed with hypertension six months prior to getting infected, all the others had one or more comorbidity such as uncontrolled diabetes, cardiac issues, asthma, and hypertension.
The second death in Chickballapur — a 65-year-old male patient who died on Wednesday — had tested positive for H1N1 and also had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease with obstructive sleep apnea apart from diabetes and hypertension. Incidentally, in at least seven of the deceased cases, the confirmation of their being positive for COVID-19 came after death. Two of the deceased are women — one 80-year-old from Gadag and another 76-year-old from Chickballapur, who had also suffered a hip fracture.
Many smokers
Sources in the State Health Department said almost all the 10 men who succumbed to the disease were smokers and “this could have been a precipitating factor.” Most of them had reported to hospitals only after the infection worsened. At least five of them had gone from one hospital to another before landing in a designated COVID hospital, sources said.
V. Ravi, Senior Professor and Head of Neuro Virology at NIMHANS, told The Hindu that comorbidities predispose the patients to multi-organ failure during an infection. Dr. Ravi, who is also part of the six-member committee to analyse and study the epidemiology of COVID-19 cases in the State, said this committee will also conduct a death audit of the deceased cases. “We will study the clinical manifestation of every case and use that data to predict future trends based on which further interventions on treatment and management strategies can be planned,” he said.
C.N. Manjunath, director of Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, who is a member of the State’s COVID-19 task force, said the functioning of vital organs is already compromised in those with comorbidities. “They were not able to tolerate superimposed pneumonia and landed in septic shock. If these patients had reported earlier to hospitals, their chances of recovery would have been better,” he said. Jayadeva has taken up a project to study the ECG and ECHO readings of COVID-19 patients admitted in Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases.
According to a study on “Comorbidity and its impact on 1,590 patients with Covid-19 in China: A Nationwide Analysis” published recently in the European Respiratory Journal, among laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19, patients with any comorbidity yielded poorer clinical outcomes than those without.
