Impact of Lockdown on Unnatural Deaths at a Tertiary Care Hospital, Kolkata

Unnatural deaths to a large extent are a curse to modern society. This research investigates trends of unnatural deaths reported to NRS Medical College Kolkata from November 2019 to January 2021. It was a retrospective descriptive study on 4403 postmortems carried out during the study period. The study period was categorized into pre-lockdown (November 2019-March2020), lockdown (April 2020-August 2020) and post-lockdown (September 2020-January 2021) phases with each phase for 5 months. Our findings have been presented with respect to age, gender, cause and manner of death. Out of 4403 autopsies, 2389 were unnatural deaths and the rest were due to natural causes. Besides, among 2389 unnatural deaths 874 were reported in the pre-lockdown phase, 484 in lockdown and 1031 in post-lockdown phases respectively. Railway incidents were most common in pre-lockdown (33.06%) and post-lockdown (27.8%) whereas hanging was the most common type of unnatural death in the lockdown phase (20.04%). Unnatural deaths that solely occur outdoors decreased during the lockdown while all other types increased during the lockdown phase. Hence, this study is determining the trends of all types of unnatural deaths reported at NRSMCH Kolkata during the study period and the improvement in public health can lower the unnatural death to a large exten.