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No plans to redefine COVID-19 deaths: Task force
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he national COVID-19 task force has dismissed a proposal to redefine what constitutes a COVID-19 fatality, after it was suggested that deaths among people with comorbidities should be categorized separately in the official tally.
Previously, East Java Governor Khofifah Indar Parawansa had suggested to Health Minister Terawan Agus Putranto that COVID-19 deaths among patients with comorbidities – the simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient – should be categorized differently from deaths among patients without comorbidities in the death toll.
“As of now, the government has no plans to make the change proposed by the East Java governor,” task force spokesperson Wiku Adisasmito said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
He added that the government followed the World Health Organization’s guidelines in tallying COVID-19 deaths, which is to count all deaths of people with confirmed or probable cases of coronavirus infection, with exceptions made for unrelated causes of deaths, such as traffic accidents.
Probable cases refer to people who had not received their test results before their deaths, but who suffered from an upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which clinically suggest COVID-19 infection.
According to the task force, other countries such as the United States followed similar guidelines for counting coronavirus fatalities.
The East Java administration, which had recorded 3,035 COVID-19 fatalities and 41,755 confirmed cases as of Wednesday, has claimed that 91.1 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the province are patients who had comorbidities.
Khofifah has since clarified her intentions for sending the letter to the health minister, claiming she did not ask the government to redefine what constituted a COVID-19 death.
“On the other hand, East Java encourages honesty and openness in the recording and reporting of all information related to COVID-19 in a manner that is more detailed than the WHO guidelines so this pandemic can be brought to an end quickly,” the governor wrote on her Instagram account, @khofifah.ip, on Tuesday.
In August, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that said 94 percent of people recorded to have died from COVID-19 had comorbidities.
As part of the efforts to protect medical workers at the forefront of the nation’s fight against the corona virus, the government is committed to providing periodic COVID-19 tests for health professionals working closely with coronavirus patients.
“We commit to give protection to health workers, who have been a big help in fighting the COVID-19 outbreak, by providing them with free periodic swab tests,” Wiku said also on Tuesday.
He added that testing would start that day in Jakarta, the country’s COVID-19 epicenter, and would later be extended elsewhere, especially to high-risk areas.
Wiku said hospitals had become the core of the outbreak as they were accommodating about 24,400 patients.
The Indonesian Medical Association (IDI) has been urging the government to provide better protection for medical workers. The association noted that at least 114 doctors and nine dentists had died of the virus, in addition to at least 70 nurses, as reported by the Indonesian Nurses Association (PPNI).
