Div commissioner asks state govt for additional 165 regular ventilators, 22 paediatric ventilators

PUNE Pune divisional commissioner Saurabh Rao has sent a proposal to the state government on Tuesday, asking for an additional 187 ventilators for the Pune division

PUNE Pune divisional commissioner Saurabh Rao has sent a proposal to the state government on Tuesday, asking for an additional 187 ventilators for the Pune division.

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The request is for 165 regular ventilators and 22 paediatric ventilators.

According to Rao there is a slight spike in the paediatric cases as compared to last year. Of the 165 regular ventilators which have been requested, 100 will be for Pune district.

“Bed availability is a crisis because of the multi-fold increases in inflow of patients. In my proposal to the state government I have asked for 165 regular ventilators for the division, of which, 100 ventilators will be for Pune district. This includes the four units which are civil surgeon Pune, government medical college Pune, PMC and PCMC. We are working on many options to increase availability of beds, like increasing beds in private hospitals,” said Rao.

“On Monday we added 439 beds and on Tuesday we are adding 400 more beds. So we will have more beds,” Rao said.

After the correspondence between district administration and Army officials, the Army is expected to declare a dedicated Covid hospital available by Wednesday.

“I have spoken to the Army authorities. They have given positive feedback. By Tuesday night or Wednesday, they are going to declare at least one hospital belonging to the Army as a Covid hospital. I have personally spoken to minister Prakash Javdekar so that he speaks to the defence minister to facilitate the process,” Rao said.

Rao also revealed that there has been a slight increase in paediatric Covid cases. “We have also asked for 22 paediatric ventilators. There is a slight spike in paediatric cases. As a precaution, we want to have a sufficient number of paediatric ventilators available. On Monday we got a case where there was a three-month old baby who was Covid positive. In the first wave there were very few paediatric cases. We are expecting that we will get these by Wednesday,” Rao said.

Beds available

The availability of beds in Pune had slightly improved on Tuesday. On Sunday and Monday no ICU and ventilator beds were available in Pune city. On Tuesday evening, the dashboard revealed that 12 ICU beds with ventilators and 12 ICU beds without ventilators were available.