Pune rural accounts for 48% of Pune’s Covid cases in the dist, available beds only 17%

Pune: The rise in cases from Pune rural has now become evident as over 48% of the cases from the district are reported from its 1,405 villages

Pune: The rise in cases from Pune rural has now become evident as over 48% of the cases from the district are reported from its 1,405 villages. However, despite the spike in cases, only 17% of the beds in the district is reserved for Covid from rural Pune. The shortage of beds in rural areas will add the load on hospitals located on the periphery of city limits.

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The administration is convinced that the current number of beds is sufficient enough to handle the surge in Covid cases in the rural areas.

As per the Covid-19 dashboard, the district has a total of 33,314 beds dedicated for Covid for the entire district of which 16,629 are vacant. While PMC has 14,156 dedicated beds for Covid, PCMC has 10,563 beds, Pune rural has only 5,920 beds of which, as of Friday morning as per the dashboard, only 2,110 are vacant. Of the vacant beds, 1,420 are isolation beds, 615 are isolation beds with oxygen and 67 are ICU beds without ventilators and 8 are vacant ICU with ventilator beds.

On Thursday, as per the district health office report, Pune district reported 3,801 new Covid cases of which 1,854 were from rural areas. As per the progressive Covid count, rural has 210,046 total cases of which 179,015 have recovered, 2,755 declared dead and 28,276 are active cases (8,166 in hospital and 20,110 in home isolation). The overall positivity rate of rural Pune is 24.06% while on Thursday the positivity rate of rural Pune stood at 20.08%.

However, zilla parishad officials who overlook the administration in the 1,405 villages claimed that the current number of beds in rural Pune is sufficient enough. Ayush Prasad, chief executive officer, zilla parishad said, “We just got 25 ventilators for rural Pune through CSR and other funds, of which we have distributed 14 and 11 are about to be distributed. Also, we are hoping to get more ventilators through CSR and PM Cares. Also, we are pushing more private hospitals to invest more money into their hospitals and ramp up their infrastructure as well. We have a smooth coordination system at taluka level to ensure that no bed skips our radar and that every patient gets it.”