“More than 300 such patients have been brought to different public and private hospitals in the past 15 days — all of them either dead on arrival (DOA) or extremely sick with “pneumonia-like symptoms”, who died within hours of their arrival.” This is a very important story! https://twitter.com/mw_bhatti/status/1250290573635760131

Dr Seemin Jamali of JPMC says on @GeoASKKS that while overall number of people coming into emergency has declined by 50% over same period last year (prob bec of the lockdown), the number of people being brought in DOA or near-death has risen by about 21%.

In most cases, the patients who died getting to the hospital or soon after arrival, are not tested for Covid and their relatives take away their bodies without allowing an autopsy.

There is already talk in the US eg that looking at the ‘excess death rate’ might provide a...>

...a more comprehensive view of the effects of Covid-19 than is reflected in official stats, esp when testing numbers are low. ‘Excess death rate’ is the increase in deaths over similar periods in the past, before the advent of Covid-19.

But there’s another scary aspect to it...

If any of this excess death rate can be attributed to Covid-19, the government’s satisfaction that the fatality rate in Pak is low compared to other places in the world, might be completely misplaced.

Recall that Imran Khan was happy to note that fatalities in Pak were about...>

...half of what they had initially feared from the projections: 96 deaths vs 191 expected on April 14.

Even if 20% of the spurt in mysterious deaths in last 15 days in Karachi alone were attributed to Covid-19, that would add about 60 fatalities to the overall total.

What if we simply haven’t counted up the totals correctly because we haven’t tested and done post-mortems?