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Work on timely referral of Covid patients, Ghaziabad told
Ghaziabad The state government has laid stress on early detection of Covid-19 cases in order to prevent the rising deaths in Ghaziabad and directed the district
Ghaziabad The state government has laid stress on early detection of Covid-19 cases in order to prevent the rising deaths in Ghaziabad and directed the district administration to streamline systems so that patients at the most get discharged from an L1 or L2 hospital, officials said on Monday.
Rajnish Dubey, UP’s additional chief secretary (medical education), on Monday held a detailed meeting with Ghaziabad officials and directed them certain measures to be taken up to contain the Covid-19 spread.
The additional chief secretary (ACS) asked district officials to ensure that referral of Covid-19 patients to L2 or L3 facility is taken up in a timely manner. According to the district officials, ACS has also directed that L2 patients can be admitted to L3 hospital as it has availability of vacant beds while the only L2 category Sanjay Nagar hospital is over 80% occupied at present.
The Ghaziabad district at present ranks third on the list of 75 districts in the state having most number of Covid-19 related deaths.
“Most of the deaths in Ghaziabad have taken place in June. Also, a majority of them are related to patients having comorbid conditions. These also include patients who went to other districts on their own and succumbed. Later, these deaths were added to our tally. ACS, during the visit to L3 category Santosh Hospital, has also asked for creation of 200 more L2 category beds. The hospital has 630 Covid beds. Four hundred of these are for L3 patients while the rest will now be for L2 patients,” said Ajay Shankar Pandey, district magistrate.
According to the state control room figures for July 6, the district has a total of 62 Covid related deaths and accounts for about 8% of total fatalities in the state. Till May 31, the district had only four death cases. However, in June alone, 51 deaths were added to the tally while seven more patients succumbed to the viral infection this month so far.
The officials said that for the purpose of immediate movement of patients to another hospital, they have requested for 15 more ambulances from the state government. “They (the ambulances) are expected to arrive soon. Now, we have also integrated the test report, referral team and ambulance service in an integrated control room. Earlier, the patients were ferried to an L1, L2 or L3 hospital only at night. Now, the integrated control room will enforce immediate referral and transportation of patients to the appropriate category Covid hospitals,” Pandey said.
At present, the Ghaziabad district has 14 ambulances, including two advanced life-support ambulances, and has further acquired 20 private ambulances for better and timely referral of patients to designated Covid hospitals.
On directions of the state government, the district on July 2 started with special surveillance drive in order to timely detect influenza-like illness (ILI) and severe cute respiratory illness (SARI) patients.
According to official records, 2,029 teams during the special surveillance drive have surveyed 589,290 households covering a total population of 2560,941. Out of these, they identified 457 ILI and 72 SARI cases, the officials said.
“These patients are now getting identified timely and we are making efforts so that they do not move to critical state. We have also started arranging for about 80 ventilator beds. We already have 33 such beds in government facilities while the rest will be acquired at private hospitals. The idea is to create backup of ventilator beds, but we are trying to prevent patients moving to ventilators,” said Dr NK Gupta, chief medical officer.
With the surge in positive cases in June, the health department officials expect that Covid-19 patients will rise further for the next two months. On Monday, the district reported 82 fresh Covid-19 cases,taking the tally of positive cases to 2,382. The total cases include 1,251 active cases while 970 patients have been discharged.
“The rise is on account of recently started antigen testing for which we now have about 19,000 rapid test kits. If positivity rate goes on, we estimate that we can even have as high as 300-400 cases per day. But we are working on reducing deaths. We have about 70% L1 patients, besides 20% under L2 category and 5% under L3 category. The recovery rate is high in L1 and L2 categories. So, our focus is for early detection of L1 or L2 patients and quality treatment of L3 patients who require critical care,” Dr Gupta added.
