IJFANS International Journal of Food and Nutritional Sciences

ISSN PRINT 2319 1775 Online 2320-7876

Assessment of Deaths with Co-morbidity and COVID-19 in Rural Northern India: A Retrospective Survey using Verbal Autopsy

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Richa Panchgaur,Ashish Kumar Verma,Sangeeta Kansal,Alok Kumar

Abstract

Objectives: The mortality toll from the Covid 19 epidemic significantly increased, mostly among people who already had co-morbid conditions of some sort. The direct cause of mortality during the pandemic could not be determined since deaths in rural regions were not registered. Our study focuses to identify the cause of death among deceased persons and stratifying them by their comorbidity status. Study Design: A cross-sectional study was done using the Verbal Autopsy (VA) tool. 143 households from community members where any death occurred were asked to fill out the VA form. Methods: Stratification was done using the presence or absence of comorbidities, a number of co-morbidities, and suspicious corona deaths. With 95% confidence intervals, the relative risk was used to calculate the mortality risk for corona suspected deaths in the years 2020 and 2021. Results: The rural region of northern India was badly affected by the corona pandemic as the data witnessed that the suspected corona death was 6.63 times higher in people with tuberculosis (95% CI, 0.91-47.83), 2.09 times higher in people with high blood pressure (95% CI, 0.96-4.56) and 5.06 times higher in people with asthma (95% CI,1.27-20.18). The proportion of men who died from comorbidity (76.1%) was higher than the proportion of women (69.2%). Conclusion: Among suspected COVID-19 cases, deceased with any comorbidity yield poorer outcomes than those without. Corona symptoms associated with any comorbidity provide poorer outcomes in terms of causalities.

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