City saw most deaths in May; fatalities on decline, says BMC

MUMBAI: Following an exercise to map recorded Covid-19 deaths to the dates on which they actually occurred, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) said that the city’s case fatality rate peaked in May and has since sloped downward. With 2,269 deaths, the city saw the highest number of Covid-19 casualties in May, followed by June (1,922) and July (1,773). BMC estimates August may see between 1,300 and 1,400 deaths.

On August 14, Mumbai recorded 47 deaths from Covid-19, taking the toll to 7,038. There were 979 new cases, taking the total number of Covid-19 cases to 1,28,535, of which 19,337 are active. The case fatality rate in Mumbai is 5.4%, compared to 3.3% in Maharashtra. The recovery rate is 79%.

According to BMC, prior to the spike in fatalities in May, the city had 15 deaths from Covid-19 in May and 475 in April. BMC has attributed the improvement in case fatality rate since May to interventions such as the Mission Save Lives, started on June 30; timely testing; and an evolving line of treatment for serious and critical cases of the infection.

Additional civic commissioner Suresh Kakani, who is also in charge of BMC’S health department, said, “Our medical interventions, evolving treatment protocol and other interventions by the civic body have helped bring down the deaths.

Plasma therapy has also helped. People are now more aware too.” BMC has been mapping deaths due to Covid-19 on the actual days they occurred, instead of when they were reported to its epidemiology cell by private and public hospitals. In June and July, BMC faced flak for reconciling deaths from April and May.

On June 15, the state disclosed that 862 additional Covid-19 deaths had occurred in Mumbai. BMC later clarified these deaths had occurred in April and May, but there was delay in the hospitals conveying this information to the epidemiology cell. Until

July 3, BMC had reconciled 751 more deaths from May and June.

Kakani said, “BMC is concerned about the date that a death occurred, instead of the date that it was reported to us. Now we know which month had the most deaths, even though some death figures were reconciled later.”

Although May saw the highest deaths, the case fatality ratio (number of deaths in comparison to cases) was highest in March (over 9.5%). In April and May, it was over 6.5%, while in June, the case fatality rate was 5%, followed by 4.5% in July and 4% as of August 12.