Beliaghata ID Hospital opens ward to handle patients of coronavirus

Kolkata: Beliaghata ID Hospital in the city has opened an isolation ward in the wake of the recent threat of 'novel coronavirus' that has hit Wuhan, Hubei province of China.

The state Health department has asked the hospital authorities to put in place adequate arrangement so that if any person complains of consistent sneezing and coughing after their arrival to the city airport from China can be directly taken to the Belighata ID Hospital.

Common symptoms of the novel coronavirus strain include respiratory symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties, according to the WHO.

A 16-bed isolation ward has been kept ready by the hospital authorities after the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) had sounded an alert. There are enough doctors and nurses in the hospital to handle the situation, a senior official of the state Health department said.

MoCA has issued alert to various airports in the country including the Kolkata airport saying that attention must be given to those who visited China particularly the Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China in the past 14 days.

Those who are having an acute onset of fever, cough, shortness of breath would be given immediate attention, officials said.

MoCA has directed for all logistics support and arrangements to be made immediately with regard to screening of passengers arriving in India from China including Hong Kong at the identified airports–Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Cochin apart from three airports at Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata that were identified earlier.

Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and National Centre for Disease Control, Directorate General of Health Services, under Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India earlier issued some guidelines regarding the issue.

Novel coronavirus denoted 2019-nCoV by the WHO and also known as Wuhan coronavirus, Wuhan flu, Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus and Wuhan pneumonia, is a positive-sense, single-stranded RNA coronavirus was first reported in 2019.

The virus was genomically sequenced after nucleic acid testing was done on a positive patient with pneumonia in 2019 during the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak.