BMC to ramp up testing as cases surge

Mumbai: Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal on Friday said the civic body will meet the rise in Covid-19 cases in the city with a slew of measures including ramping up tests and vaccination, particularly, precautionary doses.

Chahal, who chaired a review meeting with members of the state Covid-19 task force, senior municipal officers, superintendents of hospitals, and various civic medical officers, said that the number of tests in the city will be increased to 40,000 per day from the current 8,000.

On Friday, the number of fresh cases was 763 and the test positivity rate (TPR) was 7.7%. Around a week ago, the TPR was around 3%; in February, the TPR was less than 1%. In the 24 hours before Friday, 9,896 tests had been carried out.

A good sign, however, remains that the number of Covid-19 hospitalisations remain a miniscule proportion of the total available hospital beds – as things stand on Friday, only 0.56% of the city’s 24,473 beds earmarked for Covid patients were occupied.

“All civic, private and government hospitals should be prepared to tackle the situation if hospital admission increases exponentially. Apart from this, we will start a campaign to ensure all the eligible teenagers and adolescents should be vaccinated immediately,” a release issued by the BMC stated.

There are nine jumbo centres in the city —Dahisar, Malad, Goregaon, Kanjurmarg, BKC, Worli, Mahalaxmi and Richardson and Cruddas in Byculla — each of which has 3,000 beds. When the third wave receded in January, three were put on standby (Kanjurmarg, Dahisar and a portion of the BKC facility). On Friday, Chahal ordered that these be activated again after a structural audit was conducted.

Kiran Dighavkar, assistant municipal commissioner said that he has instructed the BMC war-rooms to contact all the eligible citizens and urge them for taking the precautionary dose.

Between May 25 and June 2, 40,103 beneficiaries have taken the booster dose. Till date, 691,000 Mumbai residents have taken the third dose.

“The next two weeks are going to be important. Mask behaviour should be followed and all the eligible citizens should take their vaccine immediately,” said Dr Sanjay Oak, member of the state Covid-19 task force.

“The increase in cases has been caused because the citizens have stopped following all the norms. We have seen this pattern during the last two waves and we have to understand the pattern for the next few weeks before making a concrete statement,” Dr Rahul Pandit, member of the task force, said.

“Keeping in mind the sudden rise in cases, the possibility of the fourth wave shouldn’t be ruled out and must be taken seriously,” Chahal said.

“Earlier, people used to feel little bit apprehensive about taking the precautionary dose. However, following the rise in cases since past couple of weeks, there has been an exponential rise in demand for booster dose among citizens,” said Dr Gautam Bhansali from Bombay Hospital who is also the coordinator of private hospitals with BMC.

“We have seen that there has been an increase in demand for booster doses in the city and we are hoping that now that cases have started to rise again, more citizens will come forward to take the dose,” said Sheela Jagtap, head of immunization in BMC.