No increase in respiratory illness-related deaths

Epidemiologist Dr Avery Hinds said the number of respiratory illness-related deaths in the first four months of 2020 do not reflect an uncontrolled release of the covid19 virus into the population. He claimed that the last four months of 2019, showed a higher rate of deaths from respiratory illnesses than the first four months of 2020.

At the daily Health Ministry virtual press conference on Monday, he said the ministry continues to monitor all deaths and opined that looking at the data in context, there is no increase in deaths that would be associated with prolonged circulation of the covid19 virus among the population, as has been alluded to.

He said that globally, the epidemiological evidence has shown once the virus is introduced into the population in an uncontrolled and uncontained manner, there is rapid spread, lots of healthcare workers becoming ill, overfilling of hospitals because there are more people becoming ill at the same time than can be accommodated, and excess deaths from various things including pneumonia.

He said pneumonia by itself does not equate to covid19 as there is a broad category of things being picked up by the term pneumonia. He said there is no increase in any of the respiratory illness deaths beyond what is in line with the previous year’s flu season and this suggests there wasn’t an earlier uncontrolled introduction of the virus.

Dr Hinds said claims presented in a Sunday Guardian newspaper article were dangerous, as it was presented in a vacuum and without context or comparison. He said this was not an appropriate way for mortality data to be used and appealed to the media and the public to use data more responsibly.

“What was done was mention of particular things, whether pneumonia, diabetes, hypertension, etc., that were counted and presented as numbers of deaths. With the hypertension and the diabetes figures, we recognised that the overlap, where one person may have both diabetes and hypertension, wasn’t acknowledged, so you have double counting of the people who have hypertension and diabetes in the figures presented,” he said.

Dr Hinds said the processing of mortality data is a specialised field which requires extensive training, specific programmes and processes to be used and these are elements of data analysis that the average doctor would not be exposed to on a regular basis, he said.

It is therefore not valid to utilise raw data from death registrations to monitor changes because that data needs to be evaluated and the underlying causes need to be added.