Bhubaneswar: The state Health department Sunday claimed that there was no shortage of beds and health care facilities to tackle the rising threat of Covid-19 in the state. It also claimed that works are also in the pipeline to increase hospital beds.
“We have directed all the Collectors to increase bed strength to upto five times more than what we had last year. It is not possible for us to increase the numbers of ICU in haste because it needs a lot of setups like gas pipeline and others. It will require time,” Dr Niranjan Mishra, State Public Health Director said.
He also added, “The hospital beds are divided in categories like general bed, oxygen bed, ICU bed and ICU with ventilator bed. Norms say that six out of every 100 beds should be reserved for ICU. Oxygen support beds will be increased. These oxygen support beds are called HDU (High Dependent Unit).”
The official said that the department would take only critical patients in ICU to reduce its crowd. This has been planned to be increased in phased manner. The government is also negotiating with the private hospitals, he said.
“In general ward we are seeing 25 per cent occupancy, there is 60 per cent occupancy in ICU and only 18 per cent of the ventilators are in use now. There is no critical situation in Odisha in terms of bed and oxygen availability. There is no case of crisis now in the state,” Mishra assured.
He also said that influx of Odia communities from high burden areas might pose new risks to the state. “There is a worry that if Odia communities living in Maharashtra and Gujarat come back to Odisha out of panic, there would be challenges. We are already seeing rise in cases of the disease in districts close to Chattisgarh due to the higher case load there,” he said.
When asked about the issue of oxygen supply in hospitals, he said there is no shortage now. “There is formation of a vertical group to monitor the availability of oxygen in the state. We will work towards ensuring availability of oxygen 10 times the current demand.”
The director said that the intrusion of double mutation varieties of the virus has increased the infection rate across the state.
PNN