Data error shows Kalaburagi man recovered after 93 days in hospital

BENGALURU: A 45-year-old Kalaburagi man found positive for Covid-19 on June 27 was discharged on September 28 — after an eyebrow-raising 93-day hospital stay — according to the state government’s daily pandemic bulletin. His ‘patient ID’ figured among those discharged in Tuesday’s bulletin.
However, inquiries with Kalaburagi health officials revealed that the man was discharged 11 days after he was admitted.“The patient is absolutely fine,” said Dr Vivekananda Reddy, the officer in charge of district surveillance in Kalaburagi, told TOI. “It is not an error, but a delayed update. Data entry operators had not probably added his recovery at the time of discharge.”
However, if the state’s daily Covid-19 bulletins are to be believed, the Kalaburagi man is not the only patient who has had a prolonged stay in hospital. A patient from Belagavi who was admitted on August 12 was shown as discharged on September 25 — after a 43-day stay in hospital.
When TOI asked Dr Arundhati Chandrashekar, mission director, National Health Mission, Karnataka about the delayed discharges, she said she would look into the matter. Part of Arundhati’s tasks is to prepare the state’s Covid-19 daily bulletin.
Following TOI’s inquiries, Dr Reddy later on Wednesday said his staff got a call from the Bengaluru office. “We rang up the patient again and checked on his health. He is fine,” he said.
The September 12 bulletin has 10 patients who tested positive in late June but were discharged after more than 75 days in hospital or Covid Care Centres. This includes a nine-year-old boy who, according to the bulletins, spent 78 days in a designated hospital in Bengaluru.
“It cannot be true. If a patient had spent such a long time in hospital, we would have known,” officials from Bengaluru’s district surveillance team said when asked about the boy’s case. “It must be a case of delayed reporting of recovery. We will check.”
These data aberrations have resulted in a distortion of the state’s recovery rate, say doctors working on the ground. “We are in an unexpected situation. There is too much work to be done by a department which is plagued by an acute shortage of staff. Ideally all hospitals have to update patients’ recovery and discharge on the government’s ‘Facility’ app. Some hospitals are not doing it on a real time basis due to workload,” officials said.
Senior health department officials said, “These errors might only increase in days to come as data entry operators hired on contract basis have gone on strike. The quality of data depends on the efficiency of data entry operators and the information provided to them. With cases rapidly increasing, there is fatigue setting in, especially in the health department as employees have been slogging since March.”
“Due to strike by doctors and National Health Mission workers, we had a problem for a few days. This data issue may be result of that,” health commissioner Pankaj Pandey said.