Accuracy of Verbal Autopsy for Assessment of Death Related to Covid-19

Abstract

During the pandemic, the management of corpses for Covid-19 was carried out according to the protocol by WHO. In practice, there are several difficulties in the field, one of which is if there is a sudden death where the death is not in a health facility, tools are needed to assess whether the death is related to Covid-19. This is important to decide whether the bodies are treated like Covid-19 or not. The Ministry of Health of the Republic of Indonesia has made verbal autopsies of deaths that should be suspected of being related to Covid-19. This study aims to evaluate the performance of this verbal autopsy against diagnosis in medical records. As many as 97 families of patients who died in the inpatient room were interviewed using a verbal autopsy, then the doctor concluded whether the death was related to Covid-19 or not without previously knowing the patient's diagnosis. After that, the patient's medical record is seen to find a diagnosis during treatment. Then the results were compared with the conclusions using a verbal autopsy. In this study, the autopsy verbal sensitivity was 88.09%, the specificity was 88.09% and the area under the curve was 76%, which means that the autopsy's verbal ability in diagnosing Covid-19 related deaths is considered good.