Karnataka Covid-19 surge: Three new facilities lie unused, state seeks 30% beds in Bengaluru hospitals

Government and private hospitals that have been treating regular patients since the end of the second wave are suddenly discharging patients to fulfill government demands for more beds even as over 300 beds in new facilities created by the government remain unused in the city – ostensibly due to the lack of trained medical personnel.

“BBMP officials are visiting our hospital today to discuss bed allocations. As of now things are under control although most of the hospital beds are filled with regular patients. The concern now is what we will do with the regular patients if beds are to be set aside for Covid,” said the head of medical services at a large private hospital which provided nearly 1,000 beds for Covid 19 treatment in the second wave.

As of Friday, the 166 Covid 19 patients in the city needing hospitalization through the government quota are spread across six government hospitals with the majority at the Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital (44) and the K C General Hospital (33) in the heart of Bengaluru.

“A few days ago we were asked to discharge all in-patients to facilitate the transformation of the hospital into a Covid-19 hospital. This was done despite facilities created by the state during the second wave lying unused at present,” said a senior doctor at a government facility with over 150 beds.

In an order issued on January 4, Karnataka Chief Secretary P Ravikumar stated that “private hospitals and private medical colleges will immediately reserve and keep ready 30 percent of beds in each category – ICU, ICU with ventilator, HDU/oxygenated and general beds – for treatment of Covid-19 patients referred by public health authorities”. The order says 50 percent of the beds reserved in the private facilities for government referred patients must be “free for occupation” by January 7.

The official data on the position of hospital beds in Bengaluru incidentally shows a significant improvement in ICU ventilators beds available in the city compared to the start of the second wave.

At the start of the second wave in April 2021, the ICU ventilator beds in the city were a mere 99 beds – an increase of 14 beds when compared to the beds available in the first wave in 2020.

When nearly 10,000 cases of Covid-19 began being reported on a daily basis in Bengaluru, at the peak of the second wave in May 2021, hundreds died even as family members tried to find hospital beds with ICU ventilators. As many as 8,922 people died of Covid in Bengaluru in April and May of 2021 with an average of around 150 deaths reported each day.

Currently, only 15 deaths have been reported in the week since January 1 in what is seen as the third wave of the pandemic.

The current official data on beds in the city suggests that there are as many as 207 ICU ventilator beds allotted for Covid care in government hospitals alone. As of Friday only nine of these ICU ventilator beds were occupied. There are also 114 ICU beds with only 20 occupied at present and 831 high dependency unit (HDU) beds with only 65 occupied by Covid patients at present.

Meanwhile, over 100 ICU and HDU beds at three new state of the art Covid 19 facilities created during the first and second waves of the pandemic by the Karnataka government with the assistance of corporate bodies like Texas Instruments and a charity arm of Infosys Ltd are lying unused at present.

A government hospital facility called the Charaka Hospital – attached to the Bowring Hospital (which is the old Broadway Hospital of the Bengaluru civic corporation) renovated with Rs 10 crore funding from the Infosys Foundation – and meant to have 48 ICU ventilator beds currently operates only as a vaccination centre and not a full fledged hospital. The hospital will re-open if cases continue to rise and the state government has sounded out health officials on re-opening the Charaka Hospital, sources said.

The hospital is incidentally listed among government facilities where beds are available on an official bed allocation portal which has been reactivated by the BBMP – the Bengaluru civic agency.

“When facilities like the Broadway Hospital are not being used citing a lack of manpower we cannot understand why the government wants functional hospitals to stop catering to other patients in order to dedicate beds for Covid care,” said the head of a Bengaluru hospital.

Among other newly created facilities that have been inaugurated by ministers but are currently lying locked and unused is a 200-bed Covid Field Hospital on the campus of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases. The modular hospital created with funding from Texas Instruments has 163 oxygenated beds and 37 ICU ventilator beds. A 24 bed ICU facility created at the Epidemic Diseases Hospital in Bengaluru at the end of the second wave in 2021 is also currently lying locked and unused.

“This facility became operational when the second wave had receded. There have been no patients admitted as a result. It has been lying unused,” said a staff member at the facility.

Karnataka health minister Dr K Sudhakar said on Friday that the state government is aiming to use the services of 10,000 medical and nursing students to meet the growing demands for qualified medical personnel to help in the treatment of patients at Covid 19 facilities created in the state. “The experience of the past two waves will help us anticipate and plan accordingly,” the health minister said.