BENGALURU: With Bengaluru seeing a steady decline in Covid cases over the past week, city hospitals are getting a breather of sorts as the number of admissions have been coming down. The number of new cases in the city started dropping from May 10 after weeks of witnessing a surge. Just a day before, the city had recorded 20,786 cases, after which it dropped to 16,747 cases on May 10, to 15,879 (May 11), 16,286 (May 12), 15,191 (May 13), 14,316 (May 14) and 13,402 (May 15) with a further drop to 8,344 cases May 16.
On May 17, however, the city saw an increase at 13,338 new cases, but still better than what was reported in the first week of May. According to the war room, the positivity rate in Bengaluru was 23.3 per cent between April 23 and 29, after which it shot up to 30.6 per cent between April 30 and May 6. The rate increased to 38.3 per cent between May 7 and 13, before dropping to 28.7 per cent between May 14 and 16. Experts attributed the drop in new cases to a number of factors like many patients preferring to stay at home after procuring oxygen cylinders as well as the setting up of more makeshift hospitals and Covid Care Centres. But most important of all, the reduction in cases was due to the lockdown, they felt.
Dr Nagaraj, Director of Rajiv Gandhi institute of Chest Diseases and member of the state Covid committee, said that the lockdown could have led to the decline in cases as movement and gathering of people was curtailed. “However, we need to see the number of cases for another week to predict if the cases will continue to fall.”
“After closely monitoring the entire Covid situation, I can say that currently, the problem of shortage of beds is relatively less compared to what it was before a week or 10 days ago. Although there is a high demand for oxygen beds, people are getting beds,” said Dr Suri Raju V, Medical Director, Regal Multi- Speciality Hospital. He felt that one of the reasons for this is that the number of oxygen beds has increased and CCCs now have them.
“People have started using oxygen concentrators at home, which, according to me, is also contributing significantly towards availability of beds.” However, another expert pointed out that testing in Bengaluru has come down from more than 80,000 in April to under 50,000 now, and this is why the cases have come down. Dr Srinivas Chirukuri, CEO, Prakriya Hospitals, said that there is a 20 per cent drop in demand for beds. “The demand was huge with a big waiting list earlier.
This has come down over the last four days.” Volunteers on the ground are optimistic that Bengaluru might be healing as the bed scarcity has come down. “A good number of patients are now able to walk in and get beds. Even our volunteers handling burials or cremation have seen a decline in the number of deaths,” said Saqib Idrees, a volunteer wit Bangalore For Migrants.
BBMP TRIAGING CENTRES ACROSS ZONES
The government has announced the formation of 32 Level-2 physical triaging centres across eight zones, where patients will be triaged and suggested home isolation, admission to CCCs or hospitals. BBMP is setting up Level-1 triaging centres at the ward level, besides mobile triaging centres which will visit people at home for traiging.