More Koreans dying of COVID-19 without ever receiving care

As the third surge of new coronavirus infections packs hospitals, more patients around South Korea are dying without ever having access to medical care.

Another Seoul resident died waiting for hospital treatment more than a day after being confirmed to have COVID-19, marking the second such known casualty in the capital, public health officials said Sunday.

They said the man in his 60s died at his home in Guro-gu, southern Seoul, in the early hours of Sunday. He was diagnosed with the virus around noon Friday, and had since been on standby until he was found unconscious by his family.

Earlier this week, on Tuesday, a 64-year-old man in Dongdaemun-gu, eastern Seoul, was discovered dead by emergency dispatchers after his wife, who was hospitalized with COVID-19, called 119 saying he couldn’t be reached.

A Dongdaemun-gu official said the deceased patient wasn’t assigned a bed immediately as he was relatively young. Although he had high blood pressure and diabetes, his case was not classified as urgent because he was able to self-medicate.

His symptoms, which were reported to have been mild initially, appear to have worsened rapidly overnight, the district official said, quoting his wife. She said that the night before he died, he told her over the phone that he was in pain and had blood in his sputum. The doctor who examined him after death said he had died of cardiopulmonary arrest from COVID-19.

In the days that followed, two residents of a nursing home in Gyeonggi Province -- a woman in her 80s and a man in his 60s -- died before they could be transferred to a hospital. They were confirmed with the virus Dec. 11 and 14, respectively.

At the same nursing home, three patients in their 70s and 80s died Dec. 13-16 while waiting for hospital beds to open up.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency’s Dec. 14 situation report, which represents the latest available data, estimates that 13 patients have died at home so far. Thirty died while being transported to emergency services or immediately after arriving.

Government officials recognize only three of these patients as “having died while waiting for treatment.”

In Saturday’s news briefing, officials at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency said they were debating whether these deaths should be understood as the result of care being delayed or absent.

“Patients who die at a nursing home or psychiatric ward following a COVID-19 diagnosis are not completely bereft of medical attention, for instance,” said Gwack Jin, a senior official who is in charge of patient management. But he failed to explain what kind of COVID-19 treatment the deceased nursing home residents were able to receive, or if the nursing home had the necessary equipment or staff.

Due to lack of hospital beds, at least 368 people in Seoul and nearby Incheon and Gyeonggi Province had been waiting at home for more than 24 hours after being diagnosed with COVID-19 as of Saturday.

Minister of Health and Welfare Park Neung-hoo told a news briefing Sunday afternoon that the government would expand hospitals’ bed capacity in the capital area so that “patients would not have to stay unattended for more than a day.” He did not provide the specific timeline for achieving this goal.

The government over the weekend ordered 40 hospitals to close some of their non-COVID-19 beds and turn them into COVID-19 beds. Experts worry that this move could significantly hinder medical services for people with other health concerns.

“This means patients who are already hospitalized need to move elsewhere and new patients won’t have a chance to be admitted,” said lung specialist Dr. Park Sung-hoon of Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province.

Park, who is a member of the Critical Care Society of Korea, said “not a single one” of the medical society’s suggestions for improving critical care capacity has been accommodated since the pandemic began. “But hopefully more changes will come from now on,” he said.

Meanwhile, the government reiterated Sunday that it was not considering moving to the most restrictive tier of its social distancing system.

The health minister said “it’s not that convincing of an argument to say that we need more stringent restrictions just because cases have climbed.”

“Before such restrictions can be implemented, a public consensus has to be reached,” he said.

But Korea, where cases averaged between 900 and 1,000 per day in the past week, has already met the bar for the top social distancing tier.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Kim Woo-joo of Korea University Medical Center said Korea may have to pay for the delayed response with lives. “If we think about the extent to which the hospitals are being pushed, and the timely treatment that the patients are being denied, harsher measures seem necessary,” he said.

Korea’s daily new infection count on Sunday marked yet another high of 1,097 cases -- 1,072 locally transmitted and 25 imported. The cumulative number of official cases is 49,665. Fifteen more people died, putting the death toll at 674. Currently there are 14,269 patients who have been placed in isolation, of whom 278 were severely or critically ill.

By Kim Arin (arin@heraldcorp.com)