March 20, 1981

State and city medical investigators and review committees at Lincoln and Coney Island Hospitals began simultaneous inquiries yesterday into charges by striking physicians-in-training that two patients died needlessly because of staff shortages. The inquiries got under way as the strike by the physicians against seven of the city's 16 municipal hospitals and two private, voluntary hospitals continued for the third day yesterday. In one of the deaths, Dr. Elliot Gross, the city's Chief Medical Examiner, reported last night that an autopsy yesterday showed causes for dying other than the one reported by the hospital.

President Reagan's proposed budget cuts would reduce the disposable income of poor workers who also receive welfare by so much that their families would be little better off than those who relied entirely on public assistance, according to the first comprehensive study of the potential effects on individual families on welfare. The report, by the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Welfare Policy, examined the aggregate impact that proposed reductions in six Federal programs would have on representative poor families in 10 states, including New York. The center, which is based in Washington, is directed by Thomas C.W. Joe, who was a ranking welfare official in the Nixon Administration and is the principal author of the new study. The center has the reputation among social scientists as being one of the most reliable sources of nonpartisan information on welfare matters. Edwin L. Dale Jr., a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, said today that he could not comment on specific points of the study because he and his colleagues had not seen it, but he did not dispute the study's methodology or its statistical findings. He said that the Administration had not done a state-by-state analysis of the potential impact of the proposed budget reductions on individual families.

OPERAGOERS with a taste for the offbeat will be treated to a generous selection of novelties in this opera-rich city over the weekend when a particularly varied selection of works outside the standard repertory are offered by the companies in residence. Back in the old days, 25 to 30 years ago, the City Opera was a haven for the adventurous. But after its move to Lincoln Center in 1966, the company began more and more to stage the same warhorses that dominated the repertory across the plaza at the Metropolitan Opera. Beverly Sills seems to be changing all that, if the operas being presented at the State Theater this weekend are any indication of the City Opera's present policy. Not one of them can be considered bread-and-butter fare - in fact, 30 years ago the very notion of seeing Verdi's ''Attila,'' Donizetti's ''Maria Stuarda'' or Handel's ''Giulio Cesare'' in a major New York opera house would have been unthinkable. Now, all three operas have come back to us, thanks to the so-called bel-canto revival, ''bel canto'' in this case referring to almost any onceforgotten Italian opera composed between 1600 and 1850. ''Attila'' represents the last flourish of this school, one of the works Verdi wrote before he reached his mature style in the operas from ''Rigoletto'' to ''Falstaff,'' a sequence of masterpieces that have never left the repertory.

Harold J. Smith, the boxing promoter who has been accused by the Wells Fargo National Bank of defrauding it of $21.3 million, asserted last night that at least four bank officials were involved who have not previously been mentioned in connection with the alleged fraud. In his first face-to-face interview since he went into hiding two months ago, Mr. Smith, the chairman of Muhammad Ali Professional Sports Inc., which is known as Maps, declared in an interview that he was innocent of any wrongdoing and gave an account of the situation that differed substantially from the bank's. A spokesman for the bank, asked about all the new assertions today, said the bank would have no comment. The $21.3 million loss was disclosed by Wells Fargo in a lawsuit filed here Feb. 2. The bank accused a group of sports promoters and companies of defrauding it of the money ''by internal manipulation of funds'' involving 14 separate accounts.

A picture caption in some copies of The Times on Wednesday incorrectly identified a lawyer, E.D. Bronson Jr. Mr. Bronson, of Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, is the lead attorney for the entertainer Carol Burnett in her case against The National Enquirer. An article Wednesday in Business Day gave an incorrrect age for the Washington law firm of Surrey & Morse. The firm was founded in 1950.