A 70-year-old man from the hotspot area of East Midnapore district of West Bengal, who initially tested positive for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in a hospital in Odisha’s Bhubaneswar and later recovered, died of cancer on Tuesday.
Odisha’s information and public relations department officials said the man was admitted to a Covid-19 hospital in Bhubaneswar and died on Tuesday due to hypopituitarism (cancer in the pituitary) with septic shock and multi-organ failure.
The man from West Bengal was operated upon at a Bhubaneswar-based private hospital for a pituitary tumour. On April 7, he came for a follow-up treatment to the same hospital where he tested positive for Covid-19.
“After the treatment, the man had tested negative twice for Covid-19 and was technically cured of the disease as per ICMR protocol. However, he was not released from the hospital due to co-morbidities,” a health department official said requesting anonymity.
The man was officially tagged as patient number 44 in Odisha.
Till Tuesday, 79 people in Odisha, including a two-year-old girl, tested positive for Covid-19 and 29 have recovered.
A 72-year-old man from Bhubaneswar with acute respiratory distress became the first Covid-19 casualty in Odisha on April 6. His swab sample tested a day after his death confirmed the presence of Sars-Cov-2 in his body.
The simultaneous presence of more than one health disorder such as cancer, diabetes, hypertension in a person is known as comorbidity. According to a study published in The Lancet medical journal, Covid-19 is likely to be fatal in people who already have hypertension, diabetes or heart disease.
Doctors said Covid-19 would prove to be a massive challenge for a state like Odisha where a significant number of people have co-morbid conditions.
As per the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke, more than 92,000 people in Odisha were diagnosed with diabetes alone during screening clinics held between January 1 and December 31, 2018.
Similarly, more than 118,000 people in the state were found to be suffering from hypertension while close to 34,000 had both diabetes and hypertension.
