Several private hospitals have finalised deals for Covid vaccines - Covishield, Covaxin and Russian-made Sputnik V - and the consignments are expected to start coming from next week, officials of the healthcare units said on Tuesday.
Only a handful of private hospitals are now administering Covid vaccines. Tens of thousands of vaccine recipients are waiting for other healthcare units to receive supplies and resume the vaccination drive.
The drive has remained suspended at most private vaccination centres since May 1 because of lack of supplies. The private centres now have to directly procure doses from the manufacturers.
Most hospitals were communicating with the manufacturers Serum Institute of India for Covishield and Bharat Biotech for Covaxin for over a month, but the companies were not promising supplies.
Many health clinics run by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation have said separate slots cannot be provided to the recipients of the second dose of Covid vaccines who have taken their first jabs at private hospitals.
An official of the civic body said on Thursday that they were fearing law and order problems if such recipients were given priority over residents of the respective areas, who are queuing up from very early in the morning for the jab. It will not be possible to provide separate time slots to these recipients. Most of the clinics are located in residential neighbourhoods and hundreds of people are queuing up for the vaccine. If a group is given preferential treatment, then there can be law and order problems, the official said.
Hospitals in the city want to increase the number of critical care beds for Covid patients but a shortage of ventilators is one reason they are unable to do that fast, officials said.
Since most patients infected with the new strain of the virus and admitted to ICUs need to be put on a ventilator, hospitals said adding ICU beds without the device would not make sense.
But getting ventilators, imported or produced in the country, is taking three weeks to one month.
The waiting period was two weeks in the pre-Covid times. Hospitals said the period should have been reduced given the severity of the second wave of infections in the country, but the opposite is happening.
The Covid rapid antigen test of a man with symptoms of the disease twice came back negative. On Sunday, his condition worsened to such an extent that he had to be admitted to the ICU of a private hospital.
Another elderly man with symptoms of Covid called up several testing facilities but no one agreed to collect samples from home.
Many Covid patients are becoming critical because they have to either wait for the RT-PCR test result for days or are undergoing the rapid antigen test that often throws up false negatives.
Testing centres, government as well as private, are allegedly not telling people that rapid antigen test results are not confirmatory. Reports of the rapid test often lead to a false sense of safety, which result in patients’ condition becoming critical. Metro finds out the problems and the reasons.