The health department of the Mira Bhayandar Municipal Corporation (MBMC) has ramped up the healthcare infrastructure in the twin-city to tackle any type of medical emergency which may arise due to the possible threat of the Omicron variant of coronavirus.
Civic chief Dilip Dhole has been chairing high-level meetings and personally monitoring the preparedness to ensure that the entire mechanism was well-equipped to fight any threat related to the Omicron variant.
The second wave of the pandemic had witnessed a sharp shortage of beds with oxygen support in private and public hospitals, as well as in temporary healthcare facilities. In the month of April, the twin-city saw an average of 400 cases on a daily basis, peaking at 555 cases in a single day on 20 April--the day which also witnessed 12 Covid related deaths.
This time around there is a capacity of storing around 155 MT of medical oxygen-nearly 28 percent higher than mandated by the state government authorities. While the MBMC has four self-owned tanks having capacity to store 22 MT of medical oxygen each, similar storage facilities have been set up by three other private hospitals.
Previously, the twin-city did not have its own oxygen plants. Now, the region has four pressure swing absorption (PSA) plants to manufacture medical oxygen including two set up by the MBMC and one each by Shiv Sena legislator Pratap Sarnaik and a private hospital in Mira Road. Apart from deploying adequate manpower, the MBMC claims to have prepared a total of 3,377 beds including those with oxygen-supported systems and in the intensive care unit (ICU) and general category.
While there is a significant dip in the number of daily detections and active Covid-19 cases, there is not a single patient infected with the Omicron variant found in the twin-city.
461 foreign returnees so far
As many as 32 out of the 461 foreign returnees who had recently arrived in the twin-city are reportedly untraceable. While the mobile numbers and addresses of 32 people have turned out to be incorrect, 48 of them do not reside in the twin-city anymore. The MBMC traced all the remaining 381 travellers and conducted RT-PCR tests on them twice, which turned out to be negative for Covid-19 on both the occasions.
