After 7 Months of Lockdown- The shortage of oxygen could compound the issue and be disastrous.

MUMBAI, NAVI MUMBAI, 15 SEPTEMBER, 2020 (GPN): Like Mumbai, Navi Mumbai is also facing a shortage of ICU beds and oxygen beds. Some patients have had to wait for six to eight hours for one. One such patient is 52-year-old Tanvir Khan, who had been admitted to the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation’s Covid centre at Turbhe last Thursday. On Sunday, her oxygen levels began to drop and her husband M M Khan, an APMC trader, was told that she would need an oxygen bed.

He said, “We had to wait seven hours for an ambulance equipped with oxygen cylinders. We finally shifted her to the CIDCO exhibition center at Vashi. But at 9 pm on Sunday I was told that she would have to be shifted to a private hospital as there were no ventilators at the CIDCO centre. We were shocked. We have money and know influential people and still can’t get proper treatment. This makes me wonder: what happens to the poorest of the poor?” Khan and his friend Santosh Khandge Patil visited four hospitals that night. At 1 am, they finally got a bed for his wife at a private hospital in Seawoods.

NMMC commissioner Abhijit Bangar said Navi Mumbai has only 335 ICU beds, of which just 131 are equipped with a ventilator. The satellite city has 3,310 general Covid beds and another 2,260 that are equipped with oxygen cylinders. He said that as of Monday, 40 per cent of ICU beds (114) were occupied by people from outside Navi Mumbai. “Patients from Sangli, Satara, Kolhapur, Panvel, Thane, Raigad are coming to Navi Mumbai. We can’t refuse them treatment. We are planning to build capacity in the next few days. Once this is done we will have around 510 ICU beds and 40% of them will have ventilators,” he said.