Yesterday, the RIVM briefly caused confusion by reporting 38 corona deaths in one day. A remarkable increase, because the day before there were still 16 corona deaths. However, the increase appeared to be due to an administrative error, caused by a report of 28 corona deaths from the GGD IJsselland. However, that report turned out to be about the past six months and not last week.
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It seemed to have come out of the blue: the RIVM reported 38 corona deaths in one day. On closer examination, the peak turned out to be much smaller. The higher number was due to additional reports from the GGD IJsselland. 21 additional reports of corona deaths were received by the RIVM from that GGD, while seven people had died of the corona virus in the past week.
The confusion was caused by “administrative catch-up”, says the GGD IJsselland. The vast majority of reports were therefore not from the past week, but from the past six months.
The GGD IJsselland did not provide the higher figures because of a backlog, but because the RIVM had made an extra request to all GGDs.
Extra inventory
The RIVM wants to be as sure as possible that all corona victims are counted and therefore asked the GGDs this summer to make an inventory of whether there were more corona deaths than was known.
Normally, a GGD reports it to RIVM when someone has tested positive. This person may have to go to hospital and die there. Then the GGD will report this death to the RIVM. It may also be the case that a positive tested person gets out of sight or is not registered in the hospital due to crowds.
In order to trace these unknown cases, RIVM asked the GGDs to compare the deaths in the population registers in their region with the positively tested persons and to see if there were any similarities.
Never 100 percent sure
Some GGDs have already done this, others have not yet. GGD IJsselland only now came up with the figures. These are people who had previously tested positive, but were only ‘discovered’ and passed on later as a corona death.
In total, there are 28 reported deaths in the IJsselland region. These are people who were tested positive and who have also died. It can never be said with 100 percent certainty that the coronavirus was the cause of death, but chances are, because they were infected at the time.
If the 21 deaths from the IJsselland region that were reported as a result of “catching up” are subtracted from the 38 deaths reported by the RIVM, it concerns 17 deaths, which more or less corresponds to the average of the past days.
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