According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an important characteristic of an infectious disease, particularly one caused by a novel pathogen like SARS-CoV-2, is its severity, the ultimate measure of which is its ability to cause death. Fatality rates help us understand the severity of a disease, identify at-risk populations, and evaluate quality of healthcare.1 A lot of queries on our website are therefore around the fatality of the disease.
For COVID-19, as for many infectious diseases, the true level of transmission is frequently underestimated because a substantial proportion of people with the infection are undetected either because they are asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms and thus typically fail to present at healthcare facilities.2,3 There may also be neglected or under-served segments of the population who are less likely to access healthcare or testing. Under-detection of cases may be exacerbated during an epidemic, when testing capacity may be limited and restricted to people with severe cases and priority risk groups (such as frontline healthcare workers, elderly people and people with comorbidities).4,5 Cases may also be misdiagnosed and attributed to other diseases with similar clinical presentation, such as influenza.
However, it is not true that COVID-19 is always fatal. It may not have a cure yet, but it is definitely a manageable disease now. India’s COVID-19 recovery rate currently stands at 95.12%. The total positive cases are less than 3.5 lakh and comprise just 3.43% of active cases; daily new cases have reduced to 22,065.5 The case fatality rate is 1.45% (PTI, Dec. 15, 2020).
Early detection, triaging and timely initiation of treatment are important to ensure the mortality remains low because early identification of those with severe manifestations allows for immediate optimized supportive care treatments and safe, rapid admission (or referral) to intensive care unit, thereby preventing fatalities.
Speaking on the subject, eminent physician and cardiologist and Past President of the Indian Medical Association, Dr. KK Aggarwal mentioned that mortality of symptomatic cases of the coronavirus is 1% and if asymptomatic cases are also included, the mortality is 0.3%. Therefore, the disease is treatable and not always fatal.
Source:
1 Kim GU, et al. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2020;26:948.e1–948.e3.
2 Nishiura H, et al. Int J Infect Dis. 2020;94:154–55.
3 Lau H, et al. Pulmonology. 2020. doi:10.1016/j.pulmoe.2020.05.015
4 Niehus R, et al. Lancet Infect Dis. 2020;20:803–08.
5 Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Press release. Press Information Bureau, 15th December, 2020.
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