6 jumbo Covid facilities to get 612 ICU beds

The six jumbo facilities temporarily set up across Mumbai to handle Covid-19 cases will now get intensive care units (ICU), adding 612 ICU beds to Mumbai’s total

The six jumbo facilities temporarily set up across Mumbai to handle Covid-19 cases will now get intensive care units (ICU), adding 612 ICU beds to Mumbai’s total ICU bed capacity of 1,431.

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Jumbo facilities were conceptualised and built by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) as Covid care centres (CCC1 and CCC2) to quarantine high-risk contacts of Covid-19 patients and asymptomatic patients. They are now being converted into dedicated Covid health centres (DCHC) with oxygen beds and dedicated Covid hospitals (with ICU beds) (DCH).

Currently, 174 of the existing ICU beds are vacant, recording 88% occupancy. This is relatively better than the scenario is April and May, when ICU beds had 99% occupancy, and critical patients had to wait for up to even a few hours to find ICU beds. These beds are usually needed for severe to critical Covid-19 patients. With the fatality rate in Mumbai at 5.8%, having sufficient ICU beds is crucial. As per data up to June 30, there are 957 critical Covid-19 patients in Mumbai, at approximately 3% of Mumbai’s active cases.

As part of the bid, the contractor will have to provide staff for management of the ICU facility, including one senior and one associate consultants, six resident doctors, 10 nurses, two technicians, and eight support staff, for care of a Covid-19 patient, for every 10 ICU beds. A separate cost head has been created under BMC’s budget 2020-2021 to keep track of expenditure on jumbo facilities, and each facility has been given a ‘cost centre’.

P Velarasu, additional municipal commissioner in charge of projects in BMC, said, “In case of cost centres, accounting is done for a specific geographical unit. As jumbo facilities are newly created, they have been given cost centres. We can identify the expenditure incurred by a specific facility by looking at the cost centre.” So far, BMC has spent a total of ₹630 crore on Covid-19 relief.