The state health department on Tuesday gave private hospitals a revised format to report Covid-19 cases and asked them to give a 24-hour update every morning, along with a list of patients and their comorbidities.

Private hospitals will have to give the update at 10am daily with the number of new patients admitted/discharged/referred to other hospitals/deaths in the past 24 hours. The format also has a column on the number of Covid-19 patients still admitted and another to list comorbidities of patients.

A private hospital official told Metro that he had spoken to health department officials after receiving the revised format on Tuesday. “Earlier, a hospital used to send data in the morning. Another set of data was sent in the evening if more patients were added. This was creating confusion and duplication,” the official said.

“Suppose our hospital had 10 patients when the morning data was sent. If two more patients were admitted by evening, a fresh round of data was sent in the evening, saying we had 12 patients,” he said. “Now, they want all hospitals to update their data till 10am and send a list by 10.30am.”

The revised format asks for comorbidities of a patient. A doctor said comorbidity meant more than one illness in a person and that the other illnesses made the person more vulnerable to Covid-19.

A five-member committee of doctors, which was auditing Covid-19 deaths in the state, has said many of the deaths were because of comorbidities.

On Thursday, Sinha said the committee would no longer assess all Covid-19 deaths. The committee has given broad recommendations that doctors and hospitals should follow, he said.

The distribution of the new format comes a day after chief secretary Rajiva Sinha said a complicated reporting structure was creating problems. Private hospitals are not as forthcoming with data as government hospitals, he had said on Monday.

The state government had not announced patient figures between Friday and Sunday following a difference in the number of Covid-19 cases in the state given by Sinha and health secretary Vivek Kumar on Thursday.

In a letter to Union health secretary Preeti Sudan, Kumar had listed 931 Covid-19 positive cases on Thursday. On the same day, Sinha had said the state had 572 active Covid-19 cases; 139 patients cured; 105 dead, including 33 directly from the virus.