No bed in Ranchi hospitals, new Covid centres being redied

Ranchi: With Ranchi reporting a spike in the number of coronavirus cases during the last few days and the dedicated Covid hospitals here staring at a shortage of beds, the district administration has set up four Covid care centres for asymptomatic patients.
Talking to TOI, Ranchi deputy commissioner Chhavi Ranjan said, “We have identified four new Covid care centres in the city which will cater to the asymptomatic patients. We have added 312 beds across three Covid centres and are also identifying new centres for treating the asymptomatic patients.”
The new facilities at Baba Risaldar Mazar, Tana Bhagat Guest House and SIRD campus have been able to add a total of 282 beds for treating the asymptomatic patients.
Asked about the future course of action keeping in mind the surge in cases, Ranjan said, “We are identifying new buildings and private hotels which can be converted into Covid care centres.”
Ranchi has a total of 666 cases, of which 453 are active and 213 have recovered as per the data released by the state unit of National Health Mission on Saturday morning. With Ranchi detecting 277 cases in the last five days, the three earmarked Covid-19 hospitals in the city were flooded with patients and had raised an alarm about their inability to admit any more patients.
All the beds (210) in the three Covid hospitals — Rims, CCL, Gandhinagar and Paras hospital — were occupied by July 16.
Dr Prabhat Kumar, the head of the Covid-19 task force at Rims, said, “We had a capacity of 100 beds and now we have ran short of beds. We cannot even provide beds to our own staff who are infected. Out of 100, we had earmarked 60 for patients with mild symptoms, 10 for the critically ill ones, along with an ICU facility, and 10 for infants. However we do not have a single unoccupied bed and we are keeping our health workers at the paying ward in isolation.”
Meanwhile, a state health department directive had asked all the 24 district administrations across the state to set up 10-bed Covid care centres at all CHCs in their respective districts. However, it was found that out of 14 Community Health Centres (CHCs) in Ranchi, only five have set up Covid-19 care centres and the rest are yet to start the process of setting them up.
Budhmu (10), Lapung (10) Chanho (8) Tamar (8) and Mandar (4) have set up Covid care centres but nine other CHCs do not have even a single bed for housing Covid patients.