Covid-19 facility

Untitled Carousel SevenHills less of a hell now BMC chief takes note of Mirror report; patients given fresh set of clothes, dirty bedsheets replaced, toilets and rooms cleaned.

Untitled Carousel 13,224 screened in BMC’s door-to-door op in Dharavi 113 referred for testing after being thermally screened; civic body targeting five red zones that account for most of 55 cases so far.

Mumbai’s famed health infrastructure – its storied private and trust-run hospitals and its government-run institutions, for decades the first choice of tens of thousands of poor and underprivileged from across the country – has begun to look beaten down and, dare one say, defeated in the past couple of weeks.Mumbai’s Covid-19 death toll crossed a hundred on Tuesday, propping up the state’s dubious distinction of being the worst affected in the country – both in the number of positive cases as also in fatalities. Mumbai recorded 204 fresh cases on Tuesday and 11 deaths, taking the total number of dead to 111.But more than those statistics, what has made Mumbai look bad is how its hospitals collapsed one after the other under Covid-19’s onslaught.At the last count, 15 major hospitals had shut after staff members contracted the virus. The list of hospitals downed by Covid-19 has such star names as Jaslok, Breach Candy, Khar-Hinduja, Bhatia, Wockhardt and Saifee. No other city of India has had so many hospitals taken out by coronavirus.Equally embarrassing is how woefully unprepared Mumbai still appears – nearly a month after the contagion landed on its shores. Consider this, its most important hospital in this fight -- Kasturba -- does not have an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), nor does it have a full-time senior intensivist.It’s no secret that coronavirus is especially dangerous for those with underlying health conditions – heart ailments, diabetes or respiratory diseases. Yet, Kasturba was allowed to struggle for weeks before it started transferring critically ill patients to SevenHills, Mumbai’s second most import Covid-19 facility.SevenHills has its own issues. The hospital was brought back from dead in record time (it was a seven-star private hospital that shut down after its private operator walked out) so that it could take some load off Kasturba. While the effort to revive a hospital in record time is praise-worthy, the fact remains that SevenHills still has only an eight-bed Intensive Care Unit and frantic attempts are being made to expand it to 30 beds.And, of course, it took the BMC some desperate videos and pictures leaked out by patients (which Mumbai Mirror carried on its front page on Monday) to fix SevenHills’ shockingly poor hygiene standards (read accompanying story).A task force appointed by the state government to bring down Covid-19 fatalities believes that improving critical care facilities at Covid-19 centres is an urgent requirement.Numbers back this assessment. Of the 11 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, seven were in the 50 to 65 age group and all of them had comorbid conditions like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and asthama. More worryingly, all seven died within two days of being identified as Covid-19 positive, pointing to critical care gap that is costing Mumbai lives.A 65-year-old woman, brought to KEM Hospital on April 12, died on Tuesday. She had severe breathing difficulty when she was brought in. A 36-year-old male admitted to Rajawadi hospital on April 12, died on Monday. He was asthmatic. Rajawadi does not have a chest physician and intensivist on its panel. Rajawadi is among Mumbai’s biggest hospitals in the eastern suburbs. It can take 100 Covid-19 cases, but does not have a single ICU bed.A senior doctor, who is also an infectious diseases specialist, said the way the BMC has taken decisions betrays a complete lack of preparedness. “It appears they never thought they may have to deal with thousands of cases in Mumbai,” he said.The doctor said that while the first case was detected on March 11, a month later Mumbai still does not have a full-fledged Covid-19 hospital with dedicated ICU facilities. “We need more than 500 ICU beds right now. A big private hospital should come forward and declare itself a Covid-19 facility,” he said.Additional Municipal Commissioner Suresh Kakani said ICU beds are being added phase-wise. “Between all our Covid-19 designated centres, we have 51 ventilators, including 11 at Kasturba,” he said. Kakani confirmed that 87 per cent of Covid-19 deaths have had comorbid conditions and 7 to 8 percent had age-related factors.He said intensivists from KEM, Nair and Sion hospital are assisting doctors at Kasturba in the absence of hospital’s own full-time intensivist. “We are scaling up ICU beds capacity and asking private experts also to help us in terms of treating critical care patients.”Dr Sanjay Oak, who heads the Covid-19 task force, said members of the task force will meet every day to discuss ways to reduce mortality rate. “Yes, we definitely need more ICU beds and the aim is to develop 500 ICU beds in next few days. We need more and more doctors and nurses to treat critical care patients,” he said, and added that the next 14 days will be crucial. “We want to focus on faster creation of ICU treatment facilities.”