Fog Around COVID-19 Made Thicker by New Ontario Rules for Handling Deaths

Alarming COVID-19 death statistics from seniors’ facilities continue to be in the spotlight in Ontario and elsewhere.

However, all is not as it seems in the mainstream-media reports of those statistics.

Procedures that came into effect in Ontario one month ago for dealing with deaths in long-term-care homes (LTCHs) and hospitals are contributing to exaggeration of the numbers of COVID-19 deaths — and preventing the true causes of many of those deaths from ever being uncovered.

This makes it an opportune time to cast an objective eye on procedures that came into effect in Ontario one month ago for dealing with deaths in long-term-care homes (LTCHs) and hospitals. They differ drastically from both Ontario’s previous regulations and other jurisdictions’ procedures.

In the name of efficiency and safety during the COVID-19 epidemic, the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario (OCC) and members of the province’s funeral-home industry established  the new rules and implemented them on April 9. The rules apply to almost every death in the province, not just those attributed to COVID-19.

The new approach is focused on speeding up transfer of the deceased from where they died to a funeral home and then to the place of burial or cremation.   The stated goal is to prevent overburdening of medical staff and overfilling of hospital morgues and body-storage areas in long-term-care homes (LTCHs) if there’s a surge in deaths from COVID-19.

However, there are highly problematic parts to this. For example, the new ‘expedited death response’ takes the critical and sensitive task of completing the Medical Certificates of Death (MCODs) out of the hands of the people who know and care for the residents and patients.  The stated goal is to prevent overburdening of medical staff and overfilling of hospital morgues and body-storage areas in long-term-care homes (LTCHs) if there’s a surge in deaths from COVID-19.

Instead, the chief coroner and his staff now have the exclusive right to complete MCODs for people who die in LTCHs. The new rules also give the OCC the power to complete hospital patients’ MCODs. This is despite the members of the OCC very rarely seeing the bodies of LTCH residents and hospital patients, much less meeting them before they die.  (more...)

Fog Around COVID-19 Made Thicker by New Ontario Rules for Handling Deaths

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