Nagpur: The rate of Covid-19 spread and detection of new patients since January shows a four-fold increase in under-treatment patients every month. At this rate, there will be more than 2.50 lakh patients in Vidarbha by the end of April. Assuming 5% will require hospitalization, over 12,500 will be in hospitals.
In some districts, even mild symptomatic patients are being kept in institutional quarantine to stop spread of infection. Thus, more than 25,000 patients will require hospital beds by May. Considering the present bed situation in Vidarbha, the future doesn’t look too good.
Vidarbha has approximately 33,000 hospital beds at present in hospitals, Covid Care Centres (CCCs) and institutional quarantine venues and there are just over 1.17 lakh active patients. Less than 40% of these beds have oxygen facility attached. Ventilator count is even less. Already, most of the 11 Vidarbha districts are facing severe crunch of oxygen beds and running short of ventilators. It has become difficult to find even isolation beds in institutional centres.
Take Chandrapur. There are total 1,020 beds in 11 CCCs in the district. Only 150 of them were available on April 15. Nine Dedicated Covid Hospitals in Chandrapur have 564 beds, but only four were vacant on April 15. In Wardha, as per the official dashboard, 90 out of total 1,000 beds were available. In Bhandara, 202 out of 1,533 were available, while in Gondia 553 of 1,667 were available.
The picture in Amravati and Akola is improving. Despite having more than 4,000 active patients; Akola has 100+ beds vacant as number of serious patients is less. In Amravati, there are total 3,114 beds and about 40% of them are vacant now. However, Amravati has now started catering to patients from Nagpur and neighbouring states, so the number of available beds will reduce.
Despite having a huge Covid care facility run by Gajanan Maharaj Sansthan of Shegaon, Buldhana district is running short of beds. The condition in Yavatmal is worse.
“The number of under-treatment patients will surely go up. But, the pandemic never works on a mathematical model,” said epidemiologist Dr Anand Thatte. “We have imposed strict restrictions now. Even if 70% of them are followed, infection rate will go down in next two weeks. We may not reach 2.5 lakh mark,” he said.
However, administration has started working on the mathematical projection. Bhandara, Gondia, Nagpur, Chandrapur districts are in mission mode to increase O2 beds. In Nagpur, guardian minister Nitin Raut started discussing the ‘Jumbo Covid Facility’ on Thursday. Experience is that jumbo facilities provide much respite as positive patients stop roaming around the city in search of beds which stops further spread.