The male gender has accounted for 91 percent of mysterious deaths in Kano, a new survey has revealed.
According
to the survey-based report seen by TheCable, 41.3 percent of those
involved had a fever — one of the symptoms of the novel coronavirus
disease (COVID-19).
Over the past few weeks, strange deaths have
claimed a number of prominent figures in Kano, the second-biggest state
in Nigeria (by population).
The state government admitted the
“strange deaths” and its severity on Sunday but blamed malaria and other
terminal conditions but not COVID-19.
Report of contamination
and closure of the molecular laboratory testing for COVID-19 in the
state exacerbated the situation, fuelling speculations linking the
deaths to a pandemic that has affected over 1,500 Nigerians.
Muhammad
Garba, the state’s commissioner for health, further stated that verbal
autopsy, a method of determining the cause of death via information
gathered from people who knew the medical history of the deceased, would
be used to unravel the situation.
The World Health Organization
approves verbal autopsy as a vital tool in places where undocumented
deaths are rife — but has standards for conducting such.
Since
the strange deaths took over the state, Yusuf Yau Gambo, a lecturer at
the Department of Mathematics, Yusuf Maitama Sule University in Kano,
carried out a “community-based survey on reported increased mortality in
Kano state,” giving “possible explanations with data”.
Gambo, an
applied mathematician and data analyst, stated that the report, which
has received attention from Kano State COVID-19 task force, is an
attempt to provide timely intervention to understand the situation and
to halt false narratives.
The survey, based on a very small
sample size of 260 households from over 17 local government areas,
revealed that half of the respondents (130 families) have each witnessed
more than five deaths in their vicinity in the two-week period before
the report.
About 67 percent of the respondents said the strange
deaths started from 13 April and have continued up until when the survey
concluded on April 25.
The report also revealed that most of the
reported death cases by respondents happened in Kano metropolis with a
vast majority of the deaths occurring in Kano Municipal LGA followed by
Gwale and Dala LGAs.
The report also showed that fever was
predominant in the sick but only 22% confirmed hospitalization before
death, and one-third of the victims were sick for less than five days.
COVID-19 CANNOT BE RULED OUT
Giving
a clinical perspective of the report, Auwal Abubakar, a medical doctor
and incident manager at Bauchi State government’s Emergency Operations
Centre (EOC), also noted the closeness of data with COVID-19.
“Although
it’s hard to point out the possible cause of death based on the data,
however, the possibility of relating the situation to the current
COVID-19 pandemic could not be ruled out,” Abubakar said.
“This
is because the data strongly aligns with the current COVID-19 pandemic
in terms of symptoms, incubation period, age group affected and other
demographic characteristics.”
Only one percent of deaths involved children, while about 50 percent involved adults — over the age of 60.
Gambo
said the “executive report meant for authorities concerned to take
decisive action”, recommending that the people “remain calm and let the
authorities concerned to get to the bottom of the situation”.
Kano
State currently has 115 confirmed COVID-19 cases, and President
Muhammadu Buhari in his latest national address imposed a two-week
lockdown on the northern State.
