Punjab keeps critical mortality rate low at 1.3 percent with most deaths underlying serious health conditions
Besides posting the highest recovery rate of 91 percent in the country, Punjab has also done well in keeping all the critical mortality rate among the lowest at 1.3 percent, with majority of those fatalities resulting from co-morbidity.
Out of 40 unfortunate instances so far occurring mostly in patients over 50 years, 31 persons (77 percent) were afflicted with a serious illness like end-stage kidney disease and Cancer, HIV besides uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure, Principal Secretary Health and Family Welfare, Anurag Agarwal revealed.
Meanwhile, the chronic illnesses like heart disease, hypertension, Diabetes and obesity were major associated illnesses as the contributing factors in the remaining 23 percent of cases, he further said. Captain Amarinder Singh also pointed out there were few cases which had no underlying chronic illness.
The deaths in most cases have occurred in the patients who were already suffering from serious illness which might have led to the mortality in natural course of events, he said. Among coronavirus cases, as many as 1,918 patients have already recovered out of total 2106 positive cases reported so far.
Underlining scientific, systematic and aggressive contact tracing coupled with the effective enforcement of lockdown, Agarwal had stated that doubling rate of COVID-19 in Punjab has been about 100 days for the last few days which is very encouraging.
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In all the cases, where patients are found to be positive irrespective of the underlying disease, as per ICMR guidelines the death is counted as COVID-19 death, Agarwal pointed out stating that the state's mortality rate is significantly lower than the national average of 3 percent.
-PTC News
