MUMBAI: For the third day in a row, the city registered more than 20 deaths, forcing the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to call for an audit of these deaths. On Friday, 673 cases and 27 deaths were reported in Mumbai. Considering that the daily deaths had dropped to single digits a couple of weeks ago, the sudden spurt has BMC health officials worried. Friday’s toll from the coronavirus was the highest in 23 days.
“I have asked for the complete details of all these deaths as we fear that many of these victims may have been transferred from private hospitals to public ones in their last moments,” said BMC additional commissioner Suresh Kakani. He said that patients may have stayed in private hospitals till they had money to pay the bills and may have then been transferred to public centres.
“The patients’ health parameters may have been very poor, and they could have succumbed thereafter,” he added. Kakani said that there is no fear of any rise in infection levels as the daily positivity rate in the city is low. “Despite conducting over 38,000 tests, we got the usual 600 positive cases every day,” he pointed out.
Meanwhile, the state reported a dip in Covid-19 cases and fatalities on Friday. There were 8,753 cases and 156 deaths across Maharashtra, taking the state’s total cases to 60.7 lakh, and the fatalities reached 1,22,353.
The state’s public health minister Rajesh Tope said that the state government is currently preparing for the third wave and is also focusing on vaccinating as many people as it can. “The state has enough capacity to vaccinate 10 lakh people in a day. The only thing stopping us is the availability of vaccine doses. If we can vaccinate a huge amount of the population in the next two months, we can bring down the severity of the third wave of Covid-19 to a large extent,” Tope said. He also said that the state government will be budgeting between Rs 1,500 crore and 2,000 crore to keep its hospitals ready for the next wave in the upcoming monsoon session of the legislature. He also said that there is definitely a worry about a few districts where the cases are still high, and those districts have been asked by the government to continue their surveillance.
