Like Mumbai, Navi Mumbai is also facing a shortage of
ICU beds and oxygen beds. Some patients have had to wait six to eight hours to receive one. One such patient is Tanvir Khan, 52, who had been admitted to the
Navi Mumbai Municipal CorporationCovid Center in Turbhe last Thursday. On Sunday, her oxygen levels began to drop and her husband MM Khan, a
APMC Merchant, they told him he would need an oxygen bed.
He said: “We had to wait seven hours for an ambulance equipped with oxygen cylinders. We finally moved her to the CIDCO exhibition center in Vashi. But at 9 p.m. on Sunday they told me that they would have to transfer her to a private hospital since there were no ventilators at the CIDCO center. We were shocked. We have money and we know influential people and we still cannot get the proper treatment. This makes me wonder: what about the poorest of the poor? Khan and his friend Santosh Khandge Patil visited four hospitals that night. At one in the morning, they finally found a bed for his wife at a private hospital in Seawoods.
NMMC Commissioner Abhijit Bangar said Navi Mumbai has only 335 ICU beds, of which only 131 are equipped with a ventilator. The satellite city has 3,310 general Covid beds and another 2,260 that are equipped with oxygen cylinders. He said that as of Monday, 40 percent of ICU beds (114) were occupied by people from outside Navi Mumbai. “Patients from Sangli, Satara, Kolhapur, Panvel, Thane, Raigad are coming to Navi Mumbai. We cannot deny them treatment. We are planning to build capacity in the next few days. Once this is done, we will have around 510 ICU beds and 40% of them will have ventilators, ”he said.
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