Amid the continued spurt in the Covid-19 cases in Mumbai, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Tuesday announced that it was making additional 2,269 Covid beds available to our citizens in private hospitals(including 360 ICUs) with immediate effect.
“We will be making additional 2269 Covid beds available to our citizens in private hospitals (including 360 ICUs) with immediate effect,” Mumbai Municipal Commissioner I S Chahal said here.
“This will be in addition to more than 3000 beds currently vacant in Mumbai for covid patients(including currently vacant 450 beds in private hospitals),” Chahal said.
Chahal said that the BMC was also operationalising additional 1500 beds in Jumbo field hospitals this week to take vacant beds to approx. 7000 by the weekend.
The Municipal commissioner, however, made it clear that no bed would be allotted directly to anyone by hospitals.
“All allotment of hospital beds shall be through 24 WARD WAR ROOMS only & therefore no one should try to procure a positive covid report directly from Testing Labs. Otherwise,they will find it difficult to get beds anywhere,” he said.
“Let the name come to us in our line list from labs at midnight and we will go to their homes with beds early next morning as we have been doing since last June. Let us all follow the system please,” Chahal said.
Chahal, it may be recalled, had said last week that the BMC geared itself to handle 10,000 Covid-19 patients per day.
Chahal had said that the BMC was preparing to increase the total availability of DCHC/DCH Covid beds from 13,733 to 21,000 in the next 15 days in various hospitals of Mumbai.“Assuming that the number of positives in the due course of time in Mumbai increases to 10,000 per day with assumption that 15 per cent of of these would be symptomatic – requiring beds as per ICMR guidelines,” Chahal had said.
He had pointed out that assuming that every symptomatic patient requires bed and considering a 14 days’ bed occupancy, the total beds needed to handle 10,000 cases per day for a period of next six to eight weeks, around 21,000 beds would be needed.
Chahal had said that the mortality rate is low – 4.6 per day and 0.3 per cent of the total positive cases between 10 February-24 March.
