Jesse Ramdeo

A med­ical ex­pert is warn­ing that pa­tients re­ceiv­ing dial­y­sis treat­ment or bat­tling kid­ney fail­ure are at in­creased risk of suc­cumb­ing to COVID- 19.

Clin­i­cal co-or­di­na­tor of the NWRHA’s COVID-19 par­al­lel health­care sys­tem, Dr Emile Mo­hammed, made the claim dur­ing Mon­day’s Min­istry of Health COVID-19 up­date.

He said da­ta ob­tained from across the coun­try’s three dial­y­sis cen­tres over the last six months point to a dis­turb­ing de­vel­op­ment among the vul­ner­a­ble group.

“Those three cen­tres have ac­com­mo­dat­ed 259 dial­y­sis pa­tients. This num­ber does not in­clude the emer­gency pa­tients who need emer­gency pa­tients, who need­ed emer­gency dial­y­sis in our ICUs and HDUs. This in­for­ma­tion is ex­treme­ly wor­ri­some.”

Ac­cord­ing to Mo­hammed, the death rate among in­fect­ed dial­y­sis pa­tients has raised red flags for health­care work­ers.

He said, “Of the 259 pa­tients, 30.5 per cent have died from COVID. So for a kid­ney or dial­y­sis pa­tient, chances of dy­ing of COVID is al­most one in three, that’s how dev­as­tat­ing its been for our dial­y­sis pop­u­la­tion.”

Mo­hammed said kid­ney pa­tients’ con­stant trav­el­ling and in­ter­ac­tion with med­ical per­son­nel to ac­cess health­care al­so placed them at risk of con­tract­ing the virus and glob­al stud­ies point­ed to the crit­i­cal role vac­ci­na­tions played in their pro­tec­tion.

He added, “A lot of the da­ta that we are get­ting sug­gests that be­cause their im­mune sys­tem is so sup­pressed they may not gen­er­ate the an­ti­bod­ies to a vac­cine when com­pared to the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion and re­search is lead­ing us in the di­rec­tion that shows us a third dose of your vac­cine does im­prove your an­ti­bod­ies lev­el and gives you pro­tec­tion as a dial­y­sis pa­tient.”

He not­ed that the sheer num­ber and vol­ume of dial­y­sis pa­tients to have con­tract­ed COVID-19 in the last six months has been a ma­jor cause for con­cern and stemmed from what he said was far too many peo­ple who are dialysing or on dial­y­sis not be­ing vac­ci­nat­ed.