Two jumbo facilities to ease the load on the city’s medical infrastructure would come up in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad by August 19, the district administration announced on Monday.
Pune Divisional Commissioner Saurabh Rao said work on the facilities at the College of Engineering Pune (CoEP) grounds and Annasaheb Magar grounds in Pimpri-Chinchwad had started.
“The material deployment and manpower recruitment has been completed while the construction of peripheral roads, drainage systems and water facilities will be completed soon,” Mr. Rao said, adding that they would come up by August 19.
He said the companies executing these facilities were competent and experienced, with one of them based in Delhi which had completed a 1000-bed mega facility in collaboration with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). The second had helped set-up a facility in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
With an average daily case surge of more than 1,700 in Pune city and 800 in Pimpri-Chinchwad, Mr. Rao said that authorities had been conducting proactive identification drives in areas under both civic bodies.
“Control rooms have been set up in all 15 wards of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and all eight wards of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC). The bed management system has been centralised. The emphasis in both these areas is on screening people for co-morbidities,” said Mr. Rao.
Pune cases cross 57,000
Pune city’s total case tally has gone past 57,000 of which more than 18,000 are active, with nearly 1,400 fatalities reported thus far. Pimpri-Chinchwad’s total tally has exceeded 23,000, with more than 6,000 active cases. The PCMC has reported nearly 400 deaths.
“The PCMC’s case surge has been dramatic and indeed alarming with the total case tally jumping from 5,000 at the beginning of July to 23,000 at the end of the month. We have significantly ramped up testing capacity, focusing on potential ‘super-spreaders’ like vegetable vendors, hawkers while testing more people working in the PCMC’s numerous industrial units,” said PCMC commissioner Shravan Hardikar.
He further informed that besides the jumbo COVID facility due to come up at the Annasaheb Magar grounds, another mega-facility would be functional in the civic body’s Balanagari area by August 8.
“The Balanagari facility will have a capacity of 425 beds of which 300 are oxygen beds. The manpower recruitment, civil and electrical works will be completed over next two days and the facility will be operational by August 8,” he said.
Stating that while the PCMC’s present fatality rate stood at 1.7%, Mr. Hardikar said that efforts were on to bring it below the 1.5% mark.
“A number of patients from the rural and cantonment areas in Pune district are coming for treatment in PCMC hospitals. Hence, we have to accordingly increase bed capacity. We have also procured a fleet of 125 ambulances in a bid to reduce response time between detection and admission to hospitals,” he said.
Meanwhile, Pune District Collector Naval Kishore Ram refuted suggestions that around 400 suspected Covid-19 deaths in Pune city during July had apparently been ‘unaccounted’ for. Pune Mayor Murlidhar Mohol had tweeted about this.
“While we are already conducting a thorough inquiry, this seems highly improbable. Throughout July 2019, we had 331 natural deaths. This year, there were 387 similar deaths in the same period. Last year, 35 people were ‘brought dead’ at Sassoon Hospital during the month of July. The figure this year was 17,” clarified Mr. Ram.
