BHUBANESWAR: The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided to shut down all Covid care facilities, except two, from February 28 in view of the declining coronavirus cases in the State Capital.BMC Deputy Commissioner for Health and Sanitation Suvendu Kumar Sahoo said barring SUM and Aditya Ashwini Hospital, all other existing Dedicated Covid Hospitals (DCHs) and Covid Care Centres (CCCs) at Patia and Dumduma will be closed from February 28.
Sahoo said the decision to this effect has been taken by the government in view of the improving Covid situation in the city. The civic body has already issued notices to Hi-Tech Covid hospital and Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) Covid hospital asking them to close their facilities.
Bed strength will be reduced to 70 in SUM DCH and 30 in Aditya Ashwini in view of the drastic fall in patient inflow to their Covid care establishments. “Currently, we have only 30 Covid patients undergoing treatment in three Covid hospitals,” Sahoo said.
Following the outbreak of the third wave of the pandemic in January this year, the civic body had readied 1,800 beds in different DCHs and CCCs and kept resources in readiness to manage a patient load of around 4,000 in these hospitals.
The Deputy Commissioner said apart from scaling down Covid infrastructure, the civic body has also reduced the number of Rapid Response Teams to two from 40 during peak of the third wave.
The State Capital reported 24 new Covid cases against 51 recoveries in the last 24 hours. The city now has 545 active cases.
345 fresh Covid cases, 7 deaths in Odisha
Odisha reported 345 new Covid cases and seven deaths in the last 24 hours. Health officials said with over 54,000 tests in the last 24 hours, the daily test positivity rate remained around 0.63 per cent in this period.
Jajpur reported the highest number of 52 cases followed by 39 in Sundargarh.