Strained hospitals prepare to battle monsoon illnesses
INDIA FACES COVID PANDEMIC AMID IMPENDING MALARIA AND DENGUE FEVER
WITH hospitals already severely stretched, coronavirus-hit India is now bracing for the monsoon and its deadly annual onslaught of mosquito-borne illnesses, with an overwhelmed army of public health workers the only defence.
Every year illnesses such as dengue fever and malaria infect more than half a million people and kill hundreds in India as the monsoon brings much-needed rain but also devastation and disease.
A particular problem is that many seasonal illnesses have symptoms that are virtually indistinguishable from coronavirus, such as fever, breathing difficulties and loss of appetite. This means more testing, more isolation beds and more protective equipment will be needed to ensure that patients are diagnosed correctly and not exposed to coronavirus too.
“We will need to treat everyone as if they were a Covid-19 patient,” said Vidya Thakur – medical superintendent at Mumbai’s Rajawadi Hospital. “Every precaution will have to be taken.”
At Mumbai’s massive Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, better known as Sion, undergraduates have been drafted into service, medical resident Shariva Ranadive said.
Many experienced doctors and nurses are staying on the sidelines because they are vulnerable to the virus due to their age or pre-existing conditions such as diabetes.
“Everyone is working constantly... we are overwhelmed,” Thakur said.
Healthcare workers are not the only ones battling exhaustion.
A months-long lockdown to prevent the epidemic from spreading left Mumbai with an acute shortage of sanitation workers.
Thousands of public health workers who fumigate neighbourhoods to kill diseasecarrying mosquitoes had to delay those crucial efforts for two months to focus on sanitation instead.
“Many of our men are doing double shifts, working 14 hours straight,” said Rajan Naringrekar, the head of the city’s insecticide department.
With nearly 60,000 infections, Mumbai accounts for around a fifth of India’s coronavirus cases. Home to 1.3 billion people, India has been gradually lifting a nationwide lockdown in a bid to get the economy back on track.
India’s capital New Delhi is fast running out of hospital beds amid a surge in coronavirus cases and is struggling to contain the pandemic, after critics said it did too little to prepare and reopened shopping malls and temples too soon.
Some families of people infected with Covid-19 have complained about having to hunt for beds for their relatives after hospitals turned them away.
Others said patients had been
left unattended in corridors of government-run hospitals, while local media reports of dead bodies in a hospital lobby prompted the Supreme Court to order the state administration to get its act together.
“I don’t think we expected that cases would rise this much,” said a lawmaker of the Aam Aadmi party that runs the capital, who asked not to be named. “We were so over-confident.”
The health minister in Delhi’s state government checked into hospital with high fever and was being tested for coronavirus on Tuesday (16).
Less than a month ago, Kejriwal said the city’s hospitals were well equipped to fight the virus as the lockdown had given authorities enough time to prepare. “Delhi will win, corona will lose,” he said.
The office of New Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and the city’s health authorities did not respond to requests for comment. Cases in the capital are set to surge. The government estimates it will have 550,000 Covid-19 cases by the end of July, around 13 times current numbers, and will require 150,000 beds by then.
On Monday, a government mobile app showed that of Delhi’s 9,940 Covid-19 beds, almost 5,500 were occupied. Of the 108 private and public hospitals listed the app, 25 had no beds available.
Following harsh words from the Supreme Court, India’s federal government said it would provide 500 railway coaches to be converted into Covid-19 care centres for the capital. “There should be infrastructure, there need to be beds, patients are not being looked after, this is a deplorable state of affairs,” said Justice MR Shah.
A lockdown will be reimposed on Friday (19) on some 15 million people in Chennai and several neighbouring districts, Tamil
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Nadu state officials said, cases surge in the region.
“Full Lockdown from 19th for Chennai, Thiruvallur, Chengalpet & Kanchipuram districts,” the Tamil Nadu state government tweeted on Monday. It will be in place until the end of June. The southern state has recorded just over 44,000 cases out of a nationwide total of 332,424, according to official figures.
A majority of the cases are in Chennai, according to reports, the headquarters of India’s automotive industry. (Agencies)
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