Mumbai Hospital Sealed After 26 Nurses And 3 Doctors Test Positive

Coronavirus has become a huge challenge for the government as well as the medical staff throughout the world. It is the medical staff who faces the maximum danger of getting infected with the virus while treating the patients. On Monday, 6th April, the BMC declared Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai a containment zone. This was done after 30 staff members, including 26 nurses and 3 doctors tested positive for novel coronavirus. A civil officer said that nobody is allowed to either enter or leave the Mumbai Central hospital until everyone in it tests negative twice consecutively.

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Negligence in precautionary measures

As reported by The Hindustan Times, Suresh Kakani, additional municipal commissioner (health), BMC, said, "It is the fault of the hospital administration that they didn’t take precautionary measures, due to which nearly 300 staffers have been quarantined. We have also set up a team to probe how the virus spread among so many people in a hospital setting."

The aforementioned report states that the nurses allege that the dangerous virus could have spread among the staff members due to negligence. Reportedly, on the 20th of March, two suspected and positive COVID-19 cases were brought to the hospital. The hospital administration kept the patients who were coronavirus positive in an isolation ward. But they allegedly kept the suspected patients in general ICU wards where the doctors and nurses were treating other non-COVID-19 patients. Later on March, 2 nurses working in the same ICU ward got infected with COVID-19.  "We have contracted the infection after we were exposed to suspected coronavirus patients who were undergoing treatment in a general ward at the hospital,” said a nurse from the hospital who has been found positive the HT reported.

The nurses also reported, that when the BMC came for the investigation, the nurses told them about their symptoms. A few of them alleged that their senior officers from the hospital reprimanded them for doing this. A total of 270 swabs have been collected from the hospital staff and the patients to test for novel coronavirus infection.

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'Cluster containment action plans' to contain the virus

The central government has listed Maharashtra as one of the hotspots of coronavirus infections in India. On Sunday, Maharashtra reported over 113 new cases, making the number reach beyond 700. Mumbai alone has reported 458 of the 745 COVID-19 cases in Maharashtra.

The Maharashtra government has adopted the Centre's "cluster containment action plan" to target coronavirus hotspots in the state. Under this plan, 519 teams are working in the Mumbai municipal corporation area. A total of 439 teams are working in the Pune Municipal Corporation area to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Another 210 teams have been conducting house-to-house surveillance in the Nagpur corporation area and 196 teams have been deployed in the Navi Mumbai area. There are 3,078 teams working across the state, with over 10 lakh people under surveillance.

The lack of safety equipment often makes things worse for the medical staff. A lot of doctors all over the world have lost their lives while treating COVID-19 patients. Doctor Shirin Rouhani from Iran and the Italian doctor couple are some of those heroes who lost their lives while treating their patients.

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Ayushi Aggarwal is an intern at SheThePeople.TV