The dashboard should be dashed overboard

Jun 25, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The COVID-19 dashboard of the Ministry of Health has hardly changed its format over the past year. It really is astounding that despite the calls for the information to be made more meaningful, this type of incompetence still exists.
Even more terrible is the absence of more information which can help in combating the pandemic. Not publicly reported for example are the number of active cases per Region, the number of deaths per Region, the number of new cases per Region (this has to be manually calculated by readers) or by The Citizenship Initiative Facebook page which has done an excellent job in making sense out of the daily dashboard.
Because of the manner in which the data is being presented, the government’s epidemiologists may be missing something. The coronavirus death rate, relative to infected persons, has remained fairly steady despite an increase in cases and despite the government’s own claims that younger persons are becoming infected and are being hospitalised.
In October 2020, deaths averaged 3.5 percent of total cases. This declined to less than 1 percent in January of this year but has held steady averaging just over 2 percent since then. For this month so far 2.3 percent of the total reported cases have died.
The Minister of Health is therefore correct when he states that for every 100 infections 2 persons are likely to die from the disease. But the more worrying statistic is the number of persons in the ICU. On average, one out of every four extremely severe cases end up on death bed. So, it is not a very nice thing to read about 21 cases in the ICU. You know that some of them are not coming out alive.
If younger persons are becoming infected and sicker and considering younger people tend to have a higher recovery rate than the elderly, then the death rate relative to infections should be decreasing. In other words, if younger persons constitute an increasing percentage of infections and those severely sick, then the death rate should be declining.
But this is not happening. In April, deaths accounted for 2.2% of total cases; in May it was 2.7%; and for June it is 2.3%. The daily reports suggest that those dying are mainly the elderly. So why then are these deaths not accounting for a low percentage of the total cases? It is worrying statistic.
Some hypotheses should be tested. For example, is the failure to reduce the death rate related to the treatment protocols? We do not know but surely one of the standard audits which should be undertaken should relate to the effectiveness of the treatment protocols. But this is not likely to happen for reasons which are not hard to guess.
For some time now, the Ministry of Health has not been forthcoming about the treatment which is being administered. Sometime ago, there were experiments with convalescent plasma but that treatment option no longer appears popular outside of Guyana. Several studies have questioned the benefits of this treatment.
Remdesivir was recommended as having had good results in helping patients to recover faster. But last November, the World Health Organization issued a conditional warning against the use of remdesivir in hospitalised patients, regardless of disease severity. The WHO said there was no evidence that remdesivir improved survival and other outcomes in COVID-19 patients.
Increasingly in India, there is a movement towards the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 patients. But the Food and Drug Administration does not recommend it and the WHO itself has said it should only be used in clinical trials. However, increasingly other studies are suggesting that the anti-parasitic drug is effective against the coronavirus.
The University of Oxford has begun to study this drug as possible treatment for COVID-19 patients in the United Kingdom. And a recent study published in the Lancet has shown some promising results but which it is recommended requires larger clinical trials.
There is no shortage of treatment options. What is now conclusive (or what is not being widely accepted as conclusive) is what works and what does not work. With lives at stake, doctors treating COVID-19 patients have to work with the best scientific evidence available and when this evidence is being disputed, it makes their task all the more difficult.
So what exactly are the treatment regimens being used in Guyana? Perhaps the Minister of Health can use his next TV appearance to enlighten the public on the treatment being administered to Covid-19 patients. He may also wish to try to hazard an explanation as to why the death rate remains as high as it is despite the fact that more young persons are becoming infected.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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