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Assess COEP Jumbo facility, and close down if not needed: Ajit Pawar
Given the falling number of Covid-19 cases in the district, closing down the Jumbo centre may be a choice the administration will have to make.
Four months since inauguration and with a cost of nearly Rs 80 crore till date, the makeshift, dedicated Covid-19 Jumbo care facility at the COEP is now being assessed in terms of requirement.
Given the falling number of Covid-19 cases in the district, closing down the Jumbo centre may be a choice the administration will have to make.
At a meeting held on Saturday, chaired by deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, Pawar opined that the administration must study the requirement and if not needed, then the facility could be temporarily closed.
On August 27, chief minister Uddhav Thackeray inaugurated the jumbo facility, virtually.
Although the facility was built with a capacity of 800 beds, it operated only 600 beds and was to be upgraded to full capacity in October.
However, with the number of cases dropping in November, the administration put a brake on the upgrade of the facility.
The facility also came under fire during its initial months of operation due to a high death rate and also, a large number of Covid-19 patients opting for discharge against medical advice (Dama) due to poor conditions at the facility.
During the meeting Pawar instructed the administration to review the requirement and also take into consideration the ongoing protests by workers at the facility. The Med Bros agency currently runs the facility.
Kunal Khemnar, additional municipal commissioner, who attended the meeting, said, “The deputy CM has instructed us to assess the situation - whether we need the facility or not, as the number of cases is going down drastically. Currently, we have about 150 patients still admitted to the facility, which also includes patients from rural Pune. We do not have any immediate plans to shift the patients out and we have not yet made any decisions on whether to admit new patients or not. This decision will be taken by the commissioner and the divisional commissioner.”
The facility currently has 432 beds vacant, which means there are 168 patients admitted on oxygen beds or ICU beds with and without ventilators.
The facility has 435 oxygen beds, 135 ICU beds without ventilator, and 30 ventilators.
The staff working at the facility has been protesting delayed salaries and salary cuts.
Dr Subhash Salunkhe, who heads the Maharashtra Communicable Diseases Prevention and Control Technical Committee, said, “The jumbo facility came at a time when the city had seen six months of the pandemic and then it never operated to its full capacity. It is a makeshift facility which will be brought down once the pandemic ends. Where will the ventilators and ICU beds go after that? PMC’s very own Naidu hospital, which is the state’s only infection control hospital, quite efficiently handled the swine flu pandemic and does not have an ICU unit. This money invested in the Jumbo facility could have been invested into upgrading PMC’s hospitals which would have helped in the long run even after the pandemic.”
