Fatality rate among senior citizens still a concern, reveals data from Mumbai civic body

While the overall Covid-19 case fatality rate (CFR) has come down below 4% to 3.97% as of Friday, the fatality rate for patients aged above 60 still remains a concern

While the overall Covid-19 case fatality rate (CFR) has come down below 4% to 3.97% as of Friday, the fatality rate for patients aged above 60 still remains a concern as it is not coming down yet, shows data from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)’s dashboard. The age wise fatality rate for age groups above 60 is between 8% and 18%.

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The highest fatality rate is in the age group above 80 years. According to BMC data, of 10,218 deaths in Mumbai, more than 85% (8,731) deaths are aged above 50. The data further indicates that though maximum cases are from the younger age group (between 20 and 40 years), higher fatality remains to be from those aged above 60.

According to the data, fatality rate for the age group of 60 to 69 is 8.51% followed by 12.87% for 70 to 79 age group, 17.64% for 80 to 89 age group, and 18.39% for those aged above 90, as of October 30.

However, fatality rate of all the age groups has improved when the above data is compared with data from July. This also helped bring down the overall fatality rate from 5.5 % in August to 4.5% in September 20, and below 4% on October 31.

BMC attributes this dip in fatality rate to its ‘Mission Save Lives’ launched in June to bring down the city’s CFR. On June 30, the civic body launched a nine-point strategy called ‘Mission Save Lives’ after the city’s fatality rate had touched 5.8% on June 29. The plan included an audit of every death, video surveillance of every critical and serious case, and mandatory video conferencing or telephonic meeting twice a day to review every serious case at the hands of senior doctors, among other things.

Dr Siddarth Paliwal, a city-based private health consultant, said, “The reason why the age group of over 60 continues to have higher fatalities is because of the comorbidity factor. Most of those aged above 60 have hypertension or diabetes, and when these patients report late or not report the symptoms of Covid-19 at all, there is death. The focus has to be on senior citizens whenever the vaccine arrives, considering the data is clear about who needs it first.”

One of the key factors that resulted in bringing down CFR was to increase testing in the city, and subsequently from July 7, BMC liberalised its testing policy by allowing any citizen to get tested. Also, starting Monday, BMC is going to organise 244 daily testing camps for two hours wherein citizens can walk in and get tested for free. The citizens can call 1916 and get the location of their nearest testing camp. The testing camps will be operating between 10am to 12noon.

Suresh Kakani, additional commissioner, BMC, said, “We are increasing daily testing by organising free testing camps. This will help us control the spread until a vaccine is found.”

Earlier, on Friday BMC had said that one cannot say there will not be any surge in Covid-19 cases keeping in mind the unlocking measures, and the fact that local trains are expected to start for all citizens in coming days, along with Diwali.

Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of Maharashtra’s Covid-19 taskforce, on Friday had told HT, “The spread and overall situation will increase with more testing. We need to do more testing with more unlocking. BMC has been conducting tests to its full capacity, and they will increase their capacity in the coming days.”

As of October 30, BMC has conducted a 15.26 lakh tests with a positivity rate of 16.80%. Meanwhile, on Sunday, the city reported 908 new Covid-19 cases, taking the tally to 258,405 while 25 new deaths took toll to 10,318.

Till Sunday, 229,025 patients have been discharged in Mumbai. The city’s discharge rate is 88.63%. There are 18,522 active cases in the city and the fatality rate is 3.99%. One hot spot that has shown signs of drastic improvement is Dharavi which recorded only four new cases on Sunday. Dharavi’s tally is 3,551, of which 3,139 have been discharged.