‘COVID centres don’t care for patients’

Recently, 200 out of 1,200 beds from the Jumbo COVID Care Centre at Mahalaxmi were inaugurated. Representation pic

With the active COVID-19 cases coming down in the city, some citizens have claimed that services provided to those getting isolated or quarantined to keep their family members safe, are not up to the mark.

Currently, there are about 44 such centers active in the city with a collective bed capacity of over 10,000 and hardly 10 per cent of these are occupied. But some patients have claimed that the doctors hardly visit to check on them and with the low number of people in the premises, they feel scared to reside there.

While the number of active cases have been reducing almost every day and have been below 500 the last week, civic officials have claimed that they hardly get any calls for isolation and quarantine. According to the civic body's dashboard, there are 24 COVID Care Centre 1 facilities that are active, another 20 CCC2 facilities are also functional. The CCC1 facilities were mainly kept for quarantine purposes for the close and high risk contacts; the CCC2 were the isolation facilities mainly for non-symptomatic positive patients.

Many people prefer to reside in their houses if there are no symptoms or there are only mild symptoms, but a few want to stay elsewhere to ensure their family is not affected. In one such case, S Bidaye, an Andheri resident said, "My son was moved to a quarantine facility as my daughter and he stay together. We thought as she is negative it was better for him to be isolated. But when he reached there, he was not checked even once and the doctor was consulting only on the phone. My son was scared and then he moved to home quarantine as our family doctor said that he was fine and has mild symptoms."

Civic officials said it could have been so in one case as it was the weekend. "The patient might not have been checked, but our entire machinery is still working with a similar approach as before and nothing has changed for us in treating the patients," said a civic official.

Also read: Covid-19: Mumbai cases dip to 299, second wave's lowest