Health minister, Ioana Mihăilă, has released in a press conference on Thursday the results of the checks on reporting the Covid-19 deaths, as initially signaled by her predecessor Vlad Voiculescu.
According to minister Mihăilă, gaps up to 500 deaths have been detected between the reporting made by a hospital on the two platforms that report the coronavirus deaths in Romania.
The minister said the gaps in reporting the death toll are due to the manner some hospitals report the deaths, due to some confusions of the people who report them, as well as due to some delays in reporting the casualties.
At the same time, Mihăilă said that some hospitals had admitted they had not reported the deaths to the public health body for various reasons.
According to the report issued by the Committee that probed into the manner of reporting the deaths of people infected with SARS-CoV-2, there are big differences between the number of deaths reported in Corona Forms and other reporting data bases. Health minister said it came to that following a sum of human errors.
She explained that the official source of reporting and categorizing the death is the forensic certificate, adding that the World Health Organization has introduced new disease codes for COVID and for the death caused by COVID, and those codes have been also taken over in the official reporting system from Romania.
“More information sources have been analysed. The review o the official data from the National Institute of Statistics shows the following: in 2020 there were 16,792 deaths with the main diagnosis being COVID-19 with identified virus and 234 cases with the main diagnosis being COVID-19 but with unidentified virus. At the same time, 3,590 deaths were reported due to other causes but with Covid-19 secondary diagnosis being associated, with identified virus and 281 cases with COVID-19 secondary diagnosis with unidentified virus,” said minister Mihăilă.
She released an analysis of the deaths for the two codes reported by the hospitals: Covid confirmed death and Covid suspected death.
The minister revealed that 16,120 deaths were reported in 2020 in the CoronaForms reporting platform and 18,948 in the Alerte MS system.
The committee has analysed the data from the hospitals that registered the highest gaps in reporting the Covid deaths in the two reporting platforms. Differences up to 500 cases have been reported in the same hospital, for instance.
PM Citu asks Health minister to make the report public
PM Florin Cîțu has asked Health minister Ioana Mihăilă to make the report on the Covid deaths public “so there is no misunderstanding”. As the minister avoided to say what is the total difference between the reported Covid deaths or if she is making the report public, PM Citu has asked her to publish this report. “She should it make it public, to be very clear”.