The Pune district administration on Thursday said that a jumbo COVID-19 care facility proposed in the city’s Balewadi area was likely to come up by mid-August.
Stating that the 10-day lockdown in the district, which ended on Thursday, had helped identify COVID-19 cases, Saurabh Rao, Officer on Special Duty (OSD) at the Divisional Commissioner’s office, said the 800-bed facility would ease the shortage of beds in hospitals. He also said that the district was currently testing the maximum number of samples in the country.
“This jumbo facility will have 200 ICU and 600 oxygen beds. We expect the process to be completed between August 15 and 20. In the last ten days, taking advantage of the lockdown, the Pune civic body has managed to prepare 4,000 beds (non-oxygen). We have also increased the capacities in Dalvi, Naidu and Sassoon hospitals. As many as 70 ICU beds will be added at Sassoon tomorrow and by July 31, the hospital will have 870 beds, up from its present capacity of 220,” said Mr. Rao.
Mr. Rao and District Collector Naval Kishore Ram clarified that a major data discrepancy between the medical bulletin issued daily by the State Public Health Department and the district administration had led to widespread confusion that the number of active cases in Pune were far higher.
As per district administration data, Pune has 61,944 cases of whom 23,100 were active, while the health department data puts this figure at over 40,000.
“This discrepancy is primarily due to errors in data entry. A number of private hospitals are not updating their data after discharge of patients, due to which a large number of patients get reflected as ‘active’ in the State medical bulletin. As this is a decentralised system, faulty information is going into the ICMR website, which is connected via ‘facility apps’,” Mr. Ram clarified, adding that the Pune civic body authorities were working to set the error right and the matter would be resolved in a couple of days.
The district, which has been witnessing daily case surges of more than 2,000 in the last 10 days, reported 2,310 new cases on Thursday. The death toll has risen to 1,521 with 17 more fatalities. “In the last four weeks, and especially the lockdown period, we have consciously adopted a strategy of aggressive testing. This resulted in detection of a huge number of positive cases while the rate of infection has reduced,” said Mr. Rao.
Between June 25 and July 1, in all 22,800 samples were tested of which 4,000 were positive while the case fatality rate was 2.9%. Between July 2 and July 8, the tested samples rose to 25,000 with 6,063 positive, while the fatality rate was 1.8%.
“From July 9 to July 15, a total 32,000 samples were tested while the case fatality rate was 1.9%. In the lockdown period, between July 16 and July 22, as many as 37,039 samples were tested of which 10,192 were positive. The case fatality rate has come down to 1.4%, while the district’s case recovery stands at over 60% with the case fatality rate at 2.46% which is lower than Maharashtra’s, and well below Mumbai’s fatality rate,” said Mr. Rao.
Mr. Rao, along with other senior administration officials met Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of major hospitals, along with administrators, and intensivists on Thursday.
“At present, 2,362 oxygen beds, 509 ICU beds and 305 ventilator beds are available across the district. At least 20% patients are from other districts. We cannot stop this as they too have the right to quality treatment. At today’s meeting, we discussed ways to increase bed capacity, especially in private hospitals,” he said.
Mr. Rao said that efforts were on to increase the capacity in the State-run Sassoon General Hospital, chiefly by converting the psychiatric and burn wards into dedicated COVID-19 facilities.
“Hospitals have also assured us that they would be continuously upgrading their bed availability of the administration’s dashboard in a transparent way so as to give people the true picture,” he said.
