Second wave of Covid saw more deaths with no co-morbidities in Bengal

KOLKATA: More people with no known co-morbidities died of Covid during the second wave of the pandemic in Bengal, in stark contrast to what was observed during the first wave, when more people with co-morbidities died, in a clear indication of how deadly the second wave actually was, data suggest.
Till end-April, 18.3% of total Covid deaths in Bengal had no co-morbidities.The figure shot up to 28.3% in May-end and rose slightly to 30.3% in end-July, where it has stabilised till date.

The overall case fatality rate (CFR) — the proportion of individuals diagnosed with Covid who died from it — in the second wave, however, has been lower than in the first. Bengal’s CFR has remained around 1.1% for most of the second wave.
It was in May that more Covid deaths with no co-morbidities started occurring. As the second wave claimed over 4,197 lives in Bengal that month, over 55% of them had no co-morbidities. In fact, more people with no co-morbidities died in May alone (2,320 Covid deaths) than in the entire year before that. Till April 30, of the 11,344 Covid deaths in Bengal, 2,071 (or 18.3%) of the total Covid victims had no co-morbidities.
Sukumar Mukherjee, who is part of the state’s Covid advisory group, linked this to the spike in the Delta variant. “There cannot be any clear-cut answer to this without genome sequencing or post-mortem data,” he said. “But this trend also coincided with more Delta variants being found in Bengal since April-May.
This variant is by far more severe than the variants we saw in the first wave. Delta also has immune-escape properties.” The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) data portal also captures what Mukherjee says. In the 472 samples sequenced in Bengal in May, 91% had the Delta variants.
In April, it was 59% and in March, it was just 9%. “But a deeper root-cause analysis is needed to understand why this sudden cardio-respiratory failure is being reported in the 45-60 year age-group with no known co-morbidities,” Mukherjee said.
The daily Covid death data being tracked by the state health department show that while Covid deaths with no co-morbidities hovered around 16% on April 1, it shot up to 30.3% by July 31.
Likewise, Covid deaths in people with co-morbidities was around 84% on April 1, but dropped to 69.7% by July 31. It was around April that Covid cases started spiking in Bengal. After July, cases fell sharply.
Sanjukta Dutta, an emergency medicines expert at Fortis Hospitals, also pointed out a behavioural change among Covid patients being hospitalised. “People are now coming to hospitals at a much later stage,” she said. “Basically, people are coming in when they are already very critical. This is reducing the window for medical intervention. In the first wave, this wasn’t the case.”
Covid deaths in Bengal have mostly been in the 60-75-year age-group, accounting for 41.7% of the total deaths. The 45-60-year age-group has accounted for 26.5%. Deaths have been the least in the 16-30 group. Hypertension and diabetes remain the primary co-morbidities in Covid deaths across all age-groups.