YOURSAY | Between Covid-19 ‘actual death’ and backlog

YOURSAY | ‘Why is it so difficult to confirm a Covid-19 death on same day?’

Kit Siang laments 'record' 592 fatalities yesterday as death toll reaches 20,419

Covid-19 (Sept 13): 292 reported deaths, here's when they actually died

Open Mind: This reported number of death and actual death is so confusing.

Reported deaths were 292 yesterday, but actual deaths were only four, which means 288 died some time ago but not reported.

What about the brought-in-dead cases? Did they die some time ago or when they were brought to the hospital?

A backlog means there are deaths but was not reported until it was confirmed that the death was due to Covid-19.

So, can the Health Ministry explain how many days of backlog are they experiencing and which are the states that have backlog? Only Klang Valley and Sabah have problems with “overstrained” hospitalisation.

Bogus Reformasi: I wonder why it is so difficult to confirm a Covid-19 death on the same day?

For example, when the Covid-19 patient dies at a hospital or quarantine centre, why can't the death be immediately classified as caused by Covid-19? Or is there some smart guy there who can reclassify the death as otherwise?

How long does it take to verify a brought-in-dead case as a Covid-19 death? It cannot be more than one day considering there are about 100 per day, can it?

It’s mind-boggling how the backlog occurred. Was it unavoidable or was it intentional?

Csk: Very clever - in this way, the "actual number" will always be lower than the real number of Covid-19 patients who died as many are "to be confirmed".

By the time the cause of deaths has been confirmed to be from Covid-19 many days later and backdated to be added onto the previous data, people had moved on and stop looking at the previous data, except for trends and research.

This is a masterstroke to take hundreds of cases from our daily attention and make the numbers look better.

Doc: As a healthcare personal, I understand that the Covid-19 death rate is bound to increase. At the peak of the infectivity rate in the Klang Valley in June while vaccination was ongoing, death rates were high, especially among the non-vaccinated.

On top of that, the Delta variant which has a high infectivity and mortality rate took hold in the Klang Valley. Despite having the best healthcare facilities in the country in the form of multiple government and private hospitals, Covid-19 cases there had overwhelmed the healthcare system and crashed it.

Now, the infectivity rate is increasing in other states and in the rural areas where access to hospitals is limited and transport to get to a healthcare facility is long and arduous.

In these cases, if symptoms of Covid-19 like breathing issues manifest in a person, getting him or her to a hospital in time is going to a big problem. Not to mention that vaccination rates are still low in rural areas and the Delta variant is probably the most dominant Covid-19 strain in Malaysia.

So far, there has been no announcement from this Perikatan Nasional 2.0 government on how they are going to deal with this impeding Covid-19 problem.

Which makes me question if the PM and his ministers are aware of this potential catastrophe. Or they are just planning to hide the daily death rate from the public and follow former PM Muhyiddin Yassin's playbook in painting a picture that the war on Covid-19 is all but won.

Safefail: This is the expected outcome of systematic cleansing and improving of the overall data integrity for accuracy and for it to be up-to-date. The reported spike in deaths is a one-off data correction of the previous errors/omissions.

While we are fuming over past mistakes and improprieties, the key thing now is, going forward, the reporting/statistics should reflect the reality of the daily happenings as close as practicable.

The critical indicators people are paying attention to are the number of daily deaths, number of patients under stage three, four and five, intensive care unit (ICU) cases and treatment burden (ICU/hospital occupancy).

Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin's drive for data integrity and granularity is indeed right and effective.

OCT: Statistics provided by the government are meant to put it in a good light. Seldom do these statistics reflect the truth of the situation.

The trust factor has been missing all the while. If the truth was told to the rakyat, the government would be long gone.

The PM has said he has the best team of ministers to tackle the pandemic. If that is the case, there is no need for the PM to seek the help of the opposition, kleptocrats and convicted felons.

Optimus: Whether the deaths were supposed to be reported on any given day, this is not merely statistics but lives that were lost due to Covid-19, caused by the government’s incompetent management of the pandemic.

The truth is this incompetent government has more than 20,000 lives lost under their watch and lots of blood on their hands.

Do Not Buy Frogs: Yes, please do not use data backlog as an excuse - a death is a death and a life lost. This is a stupid excuse calling it a backlog. Even if you had spread the 500 deaths out, it would have still be a huge number.

It is high time you call it as it is and learn to be brutally honest. Cut out all the political speak.

Apa Nama: We are all at the mercy of an incompetent government. By the time we reach more the 90 percent fully vaccinated, I predict our death toll could breach the 25,000 mark.

The reason is that the Health Ministry does not try to stop/avoid the deaths besides just informing us about them. Thus, we can expect more than 100 deaths per day.

As for today’s Covidnow site, 8.67 million people have not registered and about 2.7 million registered people still yet to receive the first dose.

So, you can see from here that we have more than 10 million people considered prone to infection and could lead to severe illness if infected. Of course, the vaccinated can also still contract Covid-19.

Determined Sarawakian: As long as the treatment isn't there, the death toll from serious infections will be high. That's the rationale. All the more we have to abide by the rules of Covid-19.

In Singapore, even though the nation has achieved herd immunity numbers, the infections are still rising. However, the death toll has been minimised. Vaccinated individuals have less severe sickness and the chances of mortality minimised if they get infected.

Don't forget that even though we have the vaccines, we are still required to observe the Covid-19 SOPs, like wearing face masks, washing hands, and keeping a distance of one meter from one another. 

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