На русском языке:
Белые Халаты: За 2021 год 104 больницы закупили 27 805 мешков для трупов
На беларускай мове:
Белыя Халаты: За 2021 год 104 бальніцы закупілі 27 805 мяшкоў для трупаў
The channel of the medical initiative «White Coats» published and analyzed information on the purchase of body bags in 104 hospitals in Belarus in the period from the beginning of 2020 to October 2021.
According to doctors, the purchase of such items is made based on the needs of past years. In other words, they buy approximately as much as it took in previous years. The authors believe that the fact of additional purchase of body bags can be regarded as force majeur and associated with excessive, unpredicted mortality in the hospital.
Number of purchases of body bags in some hospitals of Belarus / White Coats
Based on the above information, it turns out that some medical institutions that to some extent were engaged in the treatment of covid patients, for 2020-2021, made up to 9 purchases of bags. Most of all, according to the data in the table, bought the 3rd City Clinical Hospital named after E.V. Klumov — 1800. For comparison, centers that didn’t deal with the treatment of coronavirus pathology were limited to 1-2 purchases. So, for example, the RSPC of Pediatric Oncology and Hematology and the RSPC of Traumatology and Orthopedics made purchases of pathoanatomical bags in the period from 2019 to 2020 1-2 times.
Also, doctors give a table of the distribution of purchases of bags by Belarusian hospitals by months starting from March 2020. The purchase of 6260 bags in January is associated with the main purchases for the next calendar year. But the peak of orders fell on October 2021 — 7730 pieces, large purchases were also made in April 2020 (2275 bags), March 2021 (4860) and September 2021 (2670).
Schedule of distribution of orders for body bags from the beginning of the pandemic until October 2021. / White Coats
If we compare these peaks with the waves of COVID-19 in Belarus, it turns out that the main additional purchases of pathoanatomical bags were made during the strong increase in covid cases.
«Moreover, if we assume that in January the purchase of body bags was made on the basis of calendar year 2021, then it can be noted that in October 2021 more new bags were purchased than in January by almost a thousand»,– the White Coats report.
Most importantly, 12,569 body bags were purchased for the whole 2020. And for 10 months of 2021, 2.21 times more than for the entire previous year — 27,805 bags.
«The situation with the purchase of body bags can only be an indirect indicator of excess mortality from coronavirus in Belarus. Also, we don’t have data on all hospitals in Belarus, so extrapolating these conclusions to the whole country is not entirely representative. In addition, it is also worth remembering that we are talking purely about hospital deaths, excluding the fact of death of sick people at home»,– the White Coats summed up.
