Page 96 - Postmortem-findings-in-COVID-19-patients-and-mental-health-issues-in-the-era-of-COVID-19

8. Our COVID-19 fatality rate includes patients who

died from non COVID-19 causes. Will post-

mortem help to define actual COVID-19 death

and therefore reflect the true fatality rate?

Datuk Dr. Christopher Lee:

Yes, post-mortem will help us but, clearly, we cannot do it for all the cases. WHO has
given us a new classification on how we can classify COVID-19 deaths. It is a very

simplistic way, as WHO has looked into deaths to see whether someone has died
because of COVID-19 or whether someone has died with COVID-19. The National
Mortality Committee has gone through this classification. We have adjusted the

figures. It is sufficed to say that the number of most of the deaths in Malaysia are
because of COVID-19. However, there are approximately 7-8% of these deaths, in
which patients died with COVID-19. These patients died with other disease entities

including cancer, coronary heart diseases. I think Dr. Hafizam has shown one or two
cases during the post-mortem findings just now. Overall, it doesn’t change our
numbers in a very big way. Case fatality rate is still relatively low.