Thane: Following the demand of Thane Mayor Naresh Mhaske, the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) Commissioner has formed a Death Audit Committee, consisting of experts and doctors from the civic health department. The Committee will be responsible to present report on COVID-19 deaths in TMC.
The demand was put forth by the Thane Mayor in last week to the TMC chief, accordingly, the Committee was formed on Wednesday under the guidance of TMC commissioner Dr Vipin Sharma.
"As the effective steps have been implemented by the TMC so far to curb the spread of the virus. Hence, to keep track, review and control the death rate of COVID-19 in Thane, the Death Audit Committee has been formed. The Committee has formed consisting civic health officer, civil surgeon of civil hospital, president of Indian Medical Association and representatives of hospitals," said Dr R K Murudkar, medical health officer, TMC.
The Committee will be responsible to inspect every COVID-19 hospitals and centres and number of death records in each hospital.
"The record of every patient who have died due to COVID-19 will be scrutinised by the Committee. While, the record of each patient from his admission to the death at the hospital, during treatment will be inquired. Besides, the Committee will also be responsible to check whether the provided treatment and bill charged to the patients are according ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) guidelines or not. Hence, the death audit will help to study major causes of COVID deaths and accordingly will help planning necessary measures to curb the death rates in the city," added TNC health official.
According to the TMC official, each member of the committee will be constituted with particular task force regarding the audit, following the report which will be soon submitted to TMC.
At present, the death rate has been below 5 per cent consistently since last one month.
"The death rate of the city is consistently below 5 per cent, since October. While as per the WHO (World Health Organisation) guidelines, if the death rate continues to be below 5 per cent, for 3 weeks consistently, it indicates to be close of breaking the chain of the pandemic. However, its been more than a month that TMC has recorded the death rate below 5 per cent, which again declined to 2.2 per cent and is below 1 per cent at present," said Murudkar.
"While even the recovery rate of Thane city has reached up to 93.5 per cent. Thane city is the second-largest in the country and first in the state to implement maximum testing capacity, as every day 5,500 to 6,000 COVID tests are carried by TMC," he added.
On Wednesday, a total of 168 new COVID-19 patients were detected, while 2 deaths were reported. So far, total death count in the city has reached up to 1,161. At present, total 1,925 are active patients, while total 44,232 have recovered so far from the virus in Thane city.
