Beds to increase to 1,000 in Jamshedpur, state’s top Covid-19 hotspot
The district’s tally went up to 173 after 15 cases were reported by late Friday night and eight more on Saturday.
With the state’s top hotspot Jamshedpur now having 173 Covid-19 cases, East Singhbhum district has set the ball rolling to augment the number of dedicated Covid-19 beds to over 1,000. Currently, the district has a doubling rate of 3.46 per day vis a vis seven-day doubling rate of 8.53 days in Jharkhand and 15.48 days in India.
“We currently have 600-700 dedicated Covid-19 beds ready but we need to have additional beds as per our strategy of testing and treating ‘as much and as early as possible.’ We have started a dedicated facility at Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College Hospital (MGMMCH) which was hitherto being used mostly as an isolation ward. It now has five positive patients. Tata Main Hospital (TMH) here has 600 such beds ready and we are converting the Homeopathy College into a quarantine centre as well,” Ravishankar Shukla, East Singhbhum deputy commissioner (DC), said on Saturday.
“Eight more positive patients were detected on Saturday, of which six have a travel history while the other two were detected through contact tracing. They were admitted to TMH on Saturday evening,” added Shukla.
The district’s tally went up to 173 after 15 cases were reported by late Friday night and eight more on Saturday. Of these, 34 have so far recovered and have been discharged from TMH. Kolhan division’s tally also went up to 214 with West Singhbhum having 21 positive patients and Seraikela-Kharsawan district having 20 patients till the time of filing this report. Three more patients were discharged in West Singhbhum on Saturday.
MGMMCH superintendent Dr Sanjay Kumar said on Saturday they had turned the 100-bed isolation ward into a Covid-19 ward and would create another 100-bed ward in the new building. State health minister Banna Gupta had also called for an additional 200-bed Covid-19 ward in MGMMCH recently.
Apart from this, the TMH has 600 beds, Uma Hospital has 100 beds, Tata Motors Hospital and UCIL Hospital have 50 beds each. According to sources, the MGMMCH isolation ward was being shifted to Singhbhum Homeopathic College (SHC) where 50 beds were being readied for the purpose.
This will be the 297th state quarantine centre in Jamshedpur which had only 11 quarantine centres on May 12 when the district saw its first two Covid-19 cases. These centres now accommodate over 6,600 suspect cases and migrants coming from different states and districts.
Tata Steel general manager (GM, Medical Services) Dr Rajan Chowdhary said on Saturday that they currently have 280 dedicated beds in use to treat Covid-19 patients, while a total 600 more beds lie ready for patients.
“We are currently testing 150 samples a day which will be increased to 500 a day after new RNA Extraction is installed shortly. We have tested over 3,700 samples since May 24,” he said.
As per Dr Chowdhary, TMH had 166 Covid-19 patients till Friday, of which 45 have been discharged.
“This includes 39 cured patients from Jamshedpur and six from Seraikela-Kharsawan. Presently, we have 107 positive patients and 73 contacts thereof, taking the total to 180 patients,” he said.
Tata Motors Hospital has another nine positive patients while MGMMCH has five positive patients as of now.
