The numbers in the ICMR study are relatively small: 4% of the 17,000 Covid patients studied had secondary bacterial and fungal infections. But ICMRтАЩs senior scientists Kamini Walia, who led the study, said extrapolating these numbers to the overall Covid-19 hospitalisations shows that lakhs of people must have had a prolonged hospital stay, needing higher doses of antibiotics to stave off hospitalisation-acquired infections that typically develop after 10 days.
Covid-19 mortality across the world is 10%. The sub-group of patients with Covid-19 plus a bacterial or fungal infection, that was part of the ICMR study, had 56.7% deaths.The study also highlighted that many patients needed potent antibiotics as they had superbugs that couldnтАЩt be treated with usual antibiotics. Half of the Covid patients with bacterial infection (52.36%) were given тАЬwatch categoryтАЭ antibiotics as per the World Health Organisation; these are meant to be judiciously used for specific types of infections. A fifth of these patients were given antibiotics categorized as тАЬlast resortтАЭ or reserve category.