13 April,2021 05:47 AM IST | Mumbai | A Correspondent
The Jumbo COVID care facility at Mahalaxmi Race Course was inaugurated by the chief minister in July last year. File pic
To tackle the COVID-19 situation in the city better and ensure that positive patients don't have to wait long for beds, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is now focusing on proper coordination between hospitals and ward war rooms for bed allotment. Apart from claiming that more beds would be added over the next week, Municipal Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal said that three jumbo COVID centres with ICU and oxygenated beds would be set up in the city soon.
Over the past couple of days, the BMC has added 325 beds in various hospitals, which have increased the number of ICU beds to 2,466. However, this still doesn't seem to be enough as only 86 beds are currently available. Further, the total number of COVID beds has increased to 19,151, out of which 3,777 are vacant. In view of this, the civic chief has assured that the BMC would operationalise 1,100 additional beds, including 125 ICU ones, within a week's time.
Chahal also said that the government had decided to build three more jumbo COVID centres in the next five to six weeks and each would have a capacity of 2,000 beds including 200 ICU beds and the remaining oxygenated ones. He further said that four and five-star hotels would soon be requisitioned to create COVID Care Centres (CCC2) for positive patients.
The civic body plans to shift those patients who have recovered substantially to these CCC2 facilities to be managed by professional doctors. An official said that these centres would help make a large number of beds available to the needy patients.
Meanwhile, MLA and Minister Aaditya Thackeray did two inaugurations in Worli area on Monday - one at NSCI grounds where the existing capacity of 500 beds has been increased to 800 and the other at Nehru Science Center, where a new unit has been set up with 150 beds. Apart from this, a COVID care centre with 225 beds was inaugurated inside Poddar College.
Meanwhile, Chahal said that the civic body would now focus on the appointment of nodal officers, to make the functioning of ward war rooms and jumbo COVID centres more proactive and accurate. The nodal officers of ward war rooms and seven jumbo centres would be constantly in touch with each other to facilitate allotment of beds, especially between 11 pm and 7 am.
"Any patient calling a particular ward war room for COVID beds between 11 pm and 7 am shall be referred to a particular jumbo centre. A suitable bed should be allotted to the patient after assessing his/her medical condition. This will ensure that all needy patients are allotted beds on fast track even during the night hours," said Chahal. The nodal officers would function in two shifts from 3 pm to 11 pm and 11 pm to 7 am both at ward war rooms and jumbo centres.
The commissioner has also instructed that patients, who do not carry COVID-19 test reports, should be allotted beds at jumbo centres in the suspected category, and then their tests should be conducted.
He further said that the list of positive reports received by BMC at 11:59 pm everyday shall be supplemented with another list, which shall be submitted by all testing labs at 6 am the following day. Currently, for the swabs collected before 2 pm, the positive reports come at 11:59 pm the same day and for swabs collected after 2 pm, the positive reports come at 11:59 pm the next day.
But now the laboratories would have to submit reports by 6 am for swabs collected after 2 pm the previous day. This will help ensure that all positive patients tested after 2 pm start getting calls from ward war rooms regarding bed allotment from 8 am onwards the following day and eventually cut the allotment period of beds for needy COVID-19 patients by almost 24 hours.
After vaccination in private centres resumed on Monday, sources said that this decision has been taken as another vaccine consignment is expected to arrive.
Further, the city has also not seen a high turnout since cases started increasing. While the government says that vaccination is the need of the hour, citizens seem to be scared of stepping out. On Monday, the turnout was over 39,000.
At the 62 private hospitals where vaccination resumed on Monday, 8,511 people were vaccinated. The total turnout including senior citizens, those aged 45 and above and health and frontline workers on Monday was 39,300. A total of 17,07,978 beneficiaries have been inoculated out of which 1,95,317 have been fully vaccinated.
The turnout of senior citizens was 10,541, of those aged 45 and above was 25,617 and the number of health workers vaccinated was 786 and that of frontline workers was 2,356. A civic official said, "We are hopeful that the stock will keep coming in so we resumed the drive at private hospitals. There were four cases of adverse effects on Monday.
