Covid case fatality rate declines in Kashmir despite new variants appearing, spreading rapidly: Research

Srinagar, Oct 10: The Covid case fatality rate in Kashmir has declined with time despite new variants appearing and spreading rapidly, said a research.
As per a research study titled ‘Case Fatality Rate, Mortality Trends during Pandemic in Kashmir’ published in ‘Asian Journal of Medical Sciences’(AJMS), the researchers after undertaking in-depth analysis on the subject came to conclusion that the Covid Case Fatality Rate, in Kashmir declined with time despite new variants appearing and spreading rapidly.
The research on the topic was conducted by Tahir Ahmad Magray, Incharge Divisional Covid Control Room Kashmir (DCCRK); Dr Umar Nazir, Dr Rouf Hussain Rather, Dr Feroz Ahmad Wani all Medical Officers who worked at DCCRK to give an overview of the entire situation as a result of Covid-19 pandemic, which disturbed life cycle, unleashed fear, consumed millions of lives across the world and brought nations on knees by halting normal activities.
Although the pandemic is almost over and receding back in its severity, it merited a case study to evaluate and examine how the worst nightmare in contemporary epoch acted and what happened during successive waves and multiple trends that were felt by people here in a geographically isolated region of Kashmir Division.
As Divisional Covid Control Room, Kashmir was established and made functional with resourceful persons and experts for instant dissemination of relevant information to administration for containment measures, the team stationed there also dedicated their energy and time to collected data and monitor the overall situation and came up with a research study.
What happened during the entire span of Pandemic, Tahir Ahmad Magray, Dr Umar Nazir, Dr Rouf Hussain Rather and Dr Feroz Ahmad Wani conducted a research study on Demographic and Mortality Trends across three COVID-19 waves in Kashmir Division, which was published by Asian Journal of Medical Sciences (AJMS).
The study finds that the Case Fatality Rate declined with time despite new variants appearing which spread at a very fast rate; and mortality remained higher in elderly and in males in all the three waves.
The study published by AJMS reveals that during the three waves, Kashmir Division witnessed 274307 COVID-19 cases and 2334 deaths. The trend of COVID-19 case incidence in Kashmir division followed a pattern similar to India with two exceptions.
First, the peak of all the waves in our division occurred approximately 12- 14 days later than the country. Second, there was relatively less burden of cases during the first wave corresponding to Kashmir’s regional lockdown. The second wave had exponential growth of cases and the world’s largest peak and absolute number of cases.
The percentage of cases was higher (47% of the total cases) during the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic which can be attributed to the fact that the dominant mutant strain (delta) was more transmissible, more virulent and was escaping the immune system of our body.
“Simultaneously the lockdown measures were seen less effective due to various socio-economic constraints among the masses which made them to have complacency in adapting COVID appropriate behavior during the second wave”, researchers argue.
Lately, during the third wave the percentage of cases again came down (26.2%) despite the highly transmissible mutant variant of the virus because the population was less susceptible this time as most of the people had been infected during the first two waves of the pandemic.
The researchers claim that an overall CFR of 0.85% was observed in our population with a maximum case fatality of 1.67% in the first wave followed by 0.79% in the second wave and only 0.13% in the third wave.
“We also found that the mortality from this COVID-19 pandemic was seen highest 64% (1493) in the age group 60 years and above, followed by 30.6% (715) in the age group of 41-60 years, 4.8% (113) in the age group of 21-40 years and only 0.6% (13) occurred in the age group of 0-20 years”, researchers study says.
The entire paper can be accessed for study through online on this link https://www.nepjol.info/index.php/AJMS/issue/view/2777 published on October 01, 2022.
Previously same group of experts published a paper on “Comparison of rapid antigen testing and RT-PCR in the diagnosis of COVID-19 in Kashmir division, which was published by International Journal of Advances in Medicine which can be accessed via https://www.ijmedicine.com/index.php/ijam/article/view/3406.