“Covid-like symptom” deaths still reported in newspapers
Just about every country affected by Covid-19 has some difficulty in determining an accurate number of people who have died as a result of an infection from Covid-19. Official figures from many countries often miss out certain categories of deaths; for example, initially the United Kingdom’s official figures did not include deaths in care home resulting from Covid-19 — though they now do. And in France and Spain the official numbers still do not include deaths in the community.
So it should be no surprise that Bangladesh also has its own problems with official numbers of Covid-19 deaths. Netra News has published articles about this in the past — here for example — about how the only deaths that appear to be counted in the official figures are those where a person has died in a Covid-19 designated hospital after a Covid-19 positive test has been done. As a result, this excludes many who die at home, on the way to a hospital, at a non-Covid-19 designated heath clinic and even at a designated hospital where no test has been done before the person died. No-one quite knows how many deaths are as a result excluded.
At the beginning of the epidemic in Bangladesh, this issue was very much at the fore — because there were many reports in the newspapers of people dying after suffering symptoms similar to those who had been positively tested for Covid-19. And these cases for a time far outnumbered the officially reported deaths.
The Bangladesh Peace Observatory (BPO) — part of Dhaka University’s Genocide Studies — have been monitoring newspapers of these kinds of deaths. A couple of weeks ago the BPO published its research that showed that between March 8th, when the government announced its first official case, till May 16th, there were 615 of Covid-symptom-like deaths reported in the newspapers.
The BPO has now updated this information till May 30th. In the week of 17th to 23rd of May, it found 62 deaths of this kind reported in newspapers and in the week of May 24th to May 30th there were 54. This compares to 138 and 158 deaths officially reported during the same time period.
This could suggest that right now the officially reported deaths numbers are about three quarters of the actual totals.
However there are many caveats to making this assumption. First, only a small proportion of deaths are reported in newspapers. It would be right to assume that not all the deaths from Covid-19 symptoms are reported in the newspapers. However, at the same time one can’t assume that all of these deaths would have tested positive for Covid-19. Indeed, research research by Bangla Tribune suggests that only 10 percent of these deaths would test positive for Covid-19.
/DB
