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 Bengal government on Tuesday requested the Centre to allow it to provide Covid vaccines to private hospitals for about four lakh people who have taken their first dose at private units across the state and are awaiting the second.
The Centre till Tuesday night neither rejected nor approved the request.
The state government has drawn up an alternative plan so that the recipients could get the second jab at a government facility nearest to the private unit where they were administered the first dose. If the plan is adopted, the recipients will be given time slots for their second dose at government units.
Private hospitals hire doctors and nurses for Covid field units The health centres are focusing on large spaces where more than hundred beds can be set up for the patients
Private hospitals that are setting up Covid field hospitals in auditoriums and stadiums are recruiting nurses and doctors and redeploying doctors from departments where the patient count has dropped to run the temporary treatment centres.
The hospitals are focusing on large spaces where more than hundred beds can be set up for Covid patients, rather than opening off-site hospitals in multiple locations with only a handful of beds in each.
The Calcutta National Medical College and Hospital is facing a shortage of medical oxygen, resulting from a rapid surge in the demand for the lifesaver amid an unrelenting second wave of Covid-19 infections.
A senior official of the state health department admitted on Wednesday that the oxygen supply to the hospital was not enough to cater to all patients.
Ajay Chakraborty, the state’s director of health services, called it an “unprecedented situation”.
Reports of patients dying because of oxygen shortage have come from many parts of the country, but supply in the state was reported to be adequate so far.