KASARGOD: As promised by Health Minister K K Shailaja, the 551-bed hospital built by the Tata Group for Rs 60 crore in Kasaragod started admitting Covid patients on Wednesday. It has two doctors. The government has created 191 posts, including 40 doctors, for the hospital. On Sunday, the minister said the recruitment to the posts was in progress. Senior health officials said it would take at least three months to operationalise the Tata-built structure into a full-fledged hospital with operation theatres and intensive care units.
The government is in a catch-22 situation in the hospital. “The government made a commitment for a hospital but the structure — which is made of 128 disconnected shipping containers — is suitable for quarantine and isolation centres,” said an official. “The Tata Group designed the structure as quarantine and isolation centres,” he said. That was the need of the district when the project was announced in April. The project was announced on April 9, when there were 155 active cases in the district, the highest in Kerala, and almost all the cases were linked to the Middle East. “We needed a centre to quarantine the suspects and isolate the infected persons,” he said.
Today, the situation has changed and the government changed its policy to allow asymptomatic patients to stay at home if they have private rooms. “Today, 75% of the active cases are staying at their houses,” said district surveillance officer Dr A T Manoj. There are 1,500 beds in Covid First-line Treatment Centres with only 500 patients. Today, the district needs a hospital that can treat B and C categories of patients. The government addressed the problem by turning the District Hospital into a Covid hospital and stopped attending to non-Covid patients there.
Instead, it shifted the services of the hospital to five other centres to reduce the services mostly to out-patient consultations, earning the ire of civil society. Lok Sabha member Rajmohan Unnithan said he would go on an indefinite hunger strike demanding the opening of the Tata Hospital on November 1. He said he would not call off his protest because the hospital was opened without any facilities. A civil society group under the banner People’s Action Committee has also said that it would go on an indefinite relay hunger strike on November 2 demanding the District Hospital be restored as a non-Covid hospital.
Government under pressure
The opening of the Tata-built hospital at Thekkil on Wednesday was clearly a decision taken under pressure, said health officials. “First, there is a lot of work to be completed before the structure can be converted to a hospital. Once we start admitting Covid patients, the workers will stop coming fearing the transmission of disease. We saw that happening at the medical college at Ukkinadka,” said an official.
That 551-bed hospital is spread across more than two acres. The hospital does not have a centralised oxygen supply line, nor are there power points by the bedsides. “We are not blaming the Tata Group. They built it as an isolation and quarantine centre. But now we are developing it into a hospital. And to turn it to a hospital, a lot of work has to be done,” said the official. Another challenge posed by the sprawling complex is the efficient use of human resources. “At present, there are 40 seriously ill Covid patients in the District Hospital. They are being monitored by four nurses. At the Tata Hospital, we will require at least 10 containers to admit 40 patients and that will require three times more staff,” a doctor at the District Hospital said.
It is a serious problem because getting staff in Kasaragod is a major challenge, he said. “Of the 191 posts the government has created, 40 are of doctors. I don’t think the government can find that many doctors for Kasaragod. If it could, there would not have been so many vacancies in the district,” said another doctor in the administration wing. All the containers are fitted with AC, and so the staff have to be stationed inside for long hours, officials said. “We have to ensure the safety of our staff. We are already short-staffed. We cannot afford them to get infected,” said a senior doctor in administration wing. The ACs alone make the operational cost of the hospital high, he said.
State’s Covid-19 death toll crosses 1,400-mark
T’Puram: The number of active Covid-19 cases in the state touched 93,264 on Wednesday, with another 8,790 persons testing positive for the virus. Of them, 7,646 persons contracted the virus through local transmission, while the infection source of 872 could not be identified. As many as 178 returnees and 94 health workers were also diagnosed with Covid. Meanwhile, another 27 persons were confirmed to have died due to Covid. With this, the state’s death toll has crossed the 1,400-mark to stand at 1,403. On the day, 7,660 patients recovered from the disease, taking the tally of recoveries to 3,16,692. Ernakulam reported the highest number of cases (1,250), followed by Kozhikode with 1,149, and Thrissur with 1,018 cases. The daily test positivity rate (TPR) stands at 13.1 per cent. A total of 66,980 samples were processed on the day.