There were 12 Covid-19 deaths in Kenya by Friday, but hospitals not designated as treatment centres are registering deaths due to acute respiratory distress.
This has prompted some to ask if the numbers being given by the Ministry of Health are the only coronavirus deaths.
Then there is the issue of the unusually high number of pneumonia patients just before the government announced the first positive case of Covid-19 on March 12. The ministry has never addressed these numbers.
At a high-traffic private city hospital, whose name the Saturday Nation will not reveal for legal reasons, a 50-year-old woman was admitted complaining of stomach pains last week.
She began developing breathing problems on the second day. Chest X-rays and clinical symptoms pointed to pneumonia.
Following the directives given by the ministry, the patient’s samples were sent to Mbagathi Hospital for testing.
However, she died soon after, though her death was not recorded as being from the coronavirus.
LACK OF RESOURCES
A doctor, who requested anonymity, told us: “Heath workers at Mbagathi started by dismissing the case even before seeing the patient, but we sent samples anyway and the waiting began.”
As workers at the private hospital waited, the woman’s condition deteriorated and she lapsed into respiratory distress.
She required a ventilator, which is usually in the intensive care unit. Without the results, the doctors went on a calling spree to Covid-19 isolation centres.
None — not even the newly opened Kenya University Training and Referral Hospital — could take the patient. “We only had one ICU and could not put the patient there. There were five others already with compromised immunity,” the doctor said.
Similar tales emanate from level three hospitals, where patients show acute respiratory infection symptoms die and get recorded as pneumonia.
Level three hospitals deal with more than 50 per cent of outpatient cases.
Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe has not responded to our queries on how the ministry tracks deaths at non-coronavirus centres.
CASES INCREASE
The issue of pneumonia is further complicated by a study that has just been published in the journal JAMA in which throat and nose swabs from more than 1,200 patients with respiratory symptoms in California were analysed.
Some 21 per cent of the specimens tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory pathogens like rhinovirus/enterovirus and respiratory syncytial virus. These viruses have been found in severe and near-fatal cases of pneumonia in Kenya.
The study, “Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health”, conducted in Kenya and six other countries with a high pneumonia burden, found that the respiratory syncytial virus was the leading pathogen (31 per cent) at the sites in the 30 pathogens found to cause pneumonia.
“The presence of a non–SARS-CoV-2 pathogen may not provide reassurance that a patient does not also have the virus,” the authors of the study said.
Two weeks ago, the Nation reported on information from the national registry of diseases, which showed a dramatic increase in pneumonia cases in hospitals to 195,504 in February and March alone.
The data did not show the deaths, but the fatality rate of pneumonia in Kenya in the last decade ranges from 11 per cent to 18 per cent of cases registered.