No handover of bodies till lab results are out

Standard safety protocol for burial/cremation

29/04/2020, S. VIJAY KUMAR ,CHENNAI

Government and private hospitals will not hand over the bodies of persons who died due to Severe Acute Respiratory Illness (SARI), including COVID-19 and suspected COVID-19 cases, till the results of laboratory tests are known. A standard safety protocol for burial/cremation of such bodies will be followed, irrespective of the test results, sources in the Health Department said on Tuesday.

The decision follows the recommendations made by the State Level Technical Committee for conducting an audit of COVID-19 deaths. It was decided that all deaths linked to SARI/COVID-19/suspected COVID-19 cases should be reported to the Director of Public Health & Preventive Medicine, the Director of Medical & Rural Health Services and the Director of Medical Education within an hour.

A case-sheet exclusively for COVID-19 cases, formulated by an expert committee, will be used by doctors to ‘legibly’ enter all details that may be useful for the death audit by institutional and State-level committees. The hospital superintendent and senior doctors, drawn from various specialities, will be part of the hospital committee that will audit the death — analyse the treatment protocol and assess the cause of death — and send its report to the State-level committee on the same day, sources said.

“The findings of the death audit report should be recorded and acted upon. A copy of the patient’s case-sheet after hospital audit should be sent to the State- and district-level audit committees and also to the State Death Control Desk at the Directorate of Public Health for future reference,” a senior health official said, adding that the recommendations of the committee had been accepted for implementation.