The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Maharashtra rose to 31 on Saturday, as four patients at Kasturba Hospital in Mumbai tested positive for the disease, five cases were confirmed in Pimpri-Chinchwad, a man who returned from Qatar was confirmed in Nagpur and two patients who had returned from Dubai tested positive in Yavatmal.
The number of confirmed cases in Mumbai now stands at nine – including a patient from Thane who tested positive earlier -- while there are ten cases in Pune, five in Pimpri-Chinchwad, four in Nagpur, two in Yavatmal and one in Ahmednagar.
Of the three women and two men who tested positive in Pimpri-Chinchwad, four are contacts of those who had travelled to Dubai in a group, and the fifth is a 21-year-old with a history of travel to Thailand.
In Buldhana, a 71-year old man who had returned from Saudi Arabia and was suspected to have been exposed to coronavirus, died during treatment at the Buldhana general hospital. He had been suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure, and was initially admitted to a private hospital. On Saturday morning, he was shifted to the isolation ward of the government hospital for symptoms of coronavirus. Civil surgeon Premchand Pandit said, "His sample was sent for lab testing. He passed away at 4.20 pm. Lab report is still awaited.”
Of the four fresh cases reported at Kasturba Hospital in Mumbai on Saturday, one patient is a resident of the city, while the other three are from neighbouring Vashi, Kamothe and Kalyan.
BMC health officials said three of the four patients who tested positive at Kasturba Hospital on Saturday had a history of overseas travel, and the three men were brought directly from Mumbai International Airport when symptoms were detected during thermal screening. One of them had travelled to Dubai, another 37-year-old man had a travel history to the US and France, and a 59-year-old man had a travel history to the Philippines. The fourth patient is the son of a 65-year-old man who had tested positive for COVID-19 at Hinduja Hospital on Thursday evening.
“The condition of all the positive patients is stable and they are under proper treatment. Meanwhile, 59 patients have been quarantined, of whom three have been quarantined at Seven Hills Hospitals,” said Dr Daksha Shah, deputy director, health, BMC.
“We have deployed 667 teams across 24 wards who are creating awareness and have sanitised 2,912 societies, which includes nearly 35,000 houses. The medical officers are also informing the society chairmen to inform the BMC health department if any resident has travel history in the last 28 days,” Dr Shah said.
Meanwhile, there was a temporary scare in Nagpur after four persons who were kept in an isolation ward at the government-run Indira Gandhi Government Medical College and Hospital (IGGMCH), for suspected coronavirus infection, returned home late on Friday night even as the hospital staff "requested" them against doing so as their test results were awaited, officials said on Saturday. However, three of them returned to the hospital on Saturday afternoon again and the fourth was expected to return on instructions from authorities. "Four persons, including two women, had come to the IGGMCH on Friday morning to give their blood samples for suspected coronavirus infection. They were kept in the isolation ward. They left the hospital on their own, although the doctors and other medical staff had requested them not to do so as their test results were awaited," Nagpur district collector Ravindra Thakre said. "Two of them are close contacts of those found positive for coronavirus in Nagpur earlier. Two others had recently travelled to Thailand and Netherlands," he added. None of the four showed symptoms of coronavirus infection and their result is expected in the afternoon, Thakre said.
