The Hour the State Loses

Sources

The official forms, reports and registry cited on the page, with the exact location and the claim each one supports.

Primary sources

Certificat medical constatator al decesului (model de lucru) · necunoscută (formular tip, distribuit de servicii funerare)

CMCD: medical certificate confirming death, working form

Located at
The “Data decesului” (date of death) section, the “ora” field
Supports
The form the doctor fills in has a separate field for the hour of death, right after year, month and day.
Note
A working form distributed publicly by a funeral home, not the ministry's official issue, but it reproduces the standard CMCD structure used in current medical practice.

Ministerul Afacerilor Interne · 2024

Electronic death certificate, Annex 6

Located at
The “Data decesului” (date of death) section
Supports
The official civil-status certificate template issued through SIIEASC has only year, month and day for the date of death. It has no hour field in any of the form's three languages.
Note
A Romanian/French/English trilingual form, published by the Interior Ministry as part of the system's transparency documentation.

Institutul Național de Medicină Legală „Mina Minovici” · 2020-05

Report on the activity of the forensic medicine network in 2019

Located at
Full text, 56 pages
Supports
24,766 forensic autopsies in 2019, with no hourly breakdown of deaths or examinations anywhere in the report. The finest time granularity given is the year.

Institutul Național de Statistică · 2026

TEMPO-Online POP206D: deaths by causes and demographic criteria

Located at
The POP206D selection page and methodological note
Supports
The finest granularity INS publishes for deaths is month, county, cause (ICD code), age and sex. No INS publication contains an hour.
Note
The main INS page is unstable on direct access; this TEMPO-Online address is the verified public route for the deaths table.

Portal Legislativ · 1996

Law no. 119/1996 on civil-status records

Located at
Article 72, on statistical bulletins and INS rules
Supports
Civil-status offices prepare statistical bulletins for births, marriages, divorces and deaths, while INS sets their content, form and completion and transmission rules.
Note
The legal source for the statistical bulletin's place in the administrative chain; it does not prove the exact contents of the BSD form.

JAMA Network Open · 2026

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival at nighttime: a nationwide cohort study

Located at
Abstract and results, 874,415 adults, 2013–2024
Supports
In the United States, cardiac arrests at 11:00 pm–6:59 am had 16% lower adjusted odds of neurologically favorable survival, 14% lower odds of sustained return of spontaneous circulation and 7% lower odds of postresuscitation survival than daytime arrests; the nighttime disadvantage remained constant across the study period.
Note
US data, not Romanian. Observational study of the CARES registry, checked in the original article.

Status

Primary sources were checked directly on 2 August 2026: the CMCD and death-certificate forms were downloaded and read, the RO-STEMI and forensic medicine reports were extracted in full, the official SIIEASC pages were read, and the CARES study was checked in the original JAMA Network Open article. The BSD form (statistical bulletin for death) could not be verified through a stable public URL, and the page says so explicitly wherever it is relevant.

A note on terminology

CMCD is the abbreviation used in medical practice for the medical certificate confirming death. BSD is the abbreviation for the statistical bulletin for death. SIIEASC is the Integrated Information System for Issuing Civil-Status Records. All three are explained at first mention in the text.

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