With few suspected cases in Mumbai after coronavirus outbreak, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has planned to build a dedicated quarantine facility which can handle serious infectious diseases.
According to Mid-Day, the BMC has prepared an Rs 44-crore proposal for a facility at Chinchpokli's Kasturba Hospital. The civic body will redevelop one of Kasturba Hospital's dilapidated wards.
Additional Municipal Commissioner Suresh Kakani told Mid-Day, "Ward number 15 will be redeveloped based on the available FSI. It will have the capacity to house 145 beds and will include negative pressure isolation rooms for quarantined patients with amenities like air conditioning, internet and television."
The Maharashtra government is also mulling to set up a coronavirus testing facility at Kasturba Hospital here to reduce the burden on Pune-based National Institute of Virology (NIV) which is currently handling such samples from across the country.
Since the outbreak of the virus in China and its spread across the globe through travellers, the Maharashtra government, acting on the guidelines issued by the Centre, has been placing people in isolation wards and screening those arriving at the Mumbai international airport from places affected by the outbreak.
People coming from notified nations including China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Nepal, Indonesia and Vietnam are being monitored as part of the protocol in place to tackle the outbreak. Since January 18, a total of 48,295 passengers have been screen at Mumbai airport.
The WHO experts visited various hospitals in China's coronavirus-hit Wuhan city over the weekend as the death toll climbed to 2,592 with 150 new fatalities while the total number of confirmed cases increased to over 77,000. The country's National Health Commission (NHC) said it received reports of 409 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus infection and 150 deaths from 31 provincial-level regions on Sunday.
(Inputs from PTI)
