Enhance Covid infra: Health dept tells pvt hospitals

Kolkata: The state Health department on Friday directed all the private hospitals to augment beds and to take necessary preparations to handle the rising number of Covid cases.

Senior Health department officials held a virtual meeting with the authorities of the private hospitals and gave a detailed outline as to how to check the spread of Covid infection. It was learnt that all the private hospital authorities have assured the health officials that they would enhance the number of beds dedicated for Covid.

The health officials also wanted to know from the private health authorities about their future plan to tackle the infection.

According to sources, the private hospitals have been instructed to allot a certain percentage of the total bed capacity for Covid patients.

Some of the top private hospitals have already increased the number of dedicated Covid beds. The private hospitals have been urged to put in place adequate arrangement to ward off Covid infection.

Woodlands Hospital has enhanced the Covid beds to 45, which is 20 per cent of the total operations beds of 220. The hospital has a future plan to add 35 more beds which would be 36 percent of the total beds of the hospital, the hospital authorities said.

"At AMRI, we currently have 55 beds for Covid patients across two of our units, Dhakuria and Salt Lake, with plans to add 10 more critical beds at Dhakuria from next week. Now that we have gained experience of fighting a pandemic for the last one year," the hospital authorities said.

"We apprehend that Covid cases will rise after the elections since a large number of people are gathering at rallies and most of them are not wearing masks or maintaining social distancing norms," they added.

There are currently 11 private hospitals dedicated for Covid treatment apart from 35 government hospitals.

Around 5,604 beds are still dedicated for Covid treatment in the state.