Pune Municipal corporation orders private hospitals to reserve 80 pc beds for COVID patients

Pune Mayor, Murlidhar Mohol on Thursday informed that Pune Municipal corporation has issued an order to private hospitals to make 80 per cent of beds available for COVID patients.

"Pune Municipal corporation has issued an order for private hospitals to make 80 per cent of the beds available for COVID patients. Apart from this, the administration has also deputed dedicated officers at hospitals to look after complaints of patients and their relatives," Mohol told .

"Besides this, the administration has also increased bed capacity of government hospitals in view of an increasing number of COVID cases with every passing day," he said.

Pune city mayor further clarified that: "Presently, there is no serious need of imposing lockdown. Instead testing, tracing and vaccination drives have to be increased, which we are doing already. Earlier Deputy CM Ajit Pawar, who is also the guardian minister of Pune district, had warned on imposing strict measures, if cases do not reduce by April 2. A weekly meeting on COVID review is scheduled for tomorrow, in which a final decision about the same is expected."

Earlier today, Murlidhar Mohol was administered the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

"Eight states--Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Punjab, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh continue to show a steep rise in the COVID daily new cases. 84.61 pc of the new cases are reported from these 8 states," read the release by the Union Health Ministry today.

72,330 new cases were registered in the last 24 hours. Maharashtra has reported the highest daily new cases at 39,544. It is followed by Chhattisgarh with 4,563 while Karnataka reported 4,225 new cases.

Following this, in a significant step to exponentially expand the countrywide vaccination drive, the Centre has decided to operationalize both public and private sector COVID Vaccination Centres (CVCs) on all days of April (from today till April 30, 2021). The Centre has written to all States and Union Territories (UTs) today and asked them to make necessary arrangements to provide COVID vaccination in these CVCs on all days of the month including gazetted holidays during April 2021.

( With inputs from ANI )