HYDERABAD: Telangana health department officials, who have so far maintained that the third wave of Covid-19 in the state would be benign, and that there was no reason for anyone to worry about catching Covid, at least the one caused by the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus, appeared to have started pressing panic buttons on Tuesday.
Though sounding confident all along that any Covid wave would be met with firmly, the health department on Tuesday began making preparations for a rush of Covid patients into hospitals. The first indication of this was a decision by the Gandhi Hospital to limit its intake of patients and discharge stable patients to create room and make more beds available to an expected rise of Covid-hit people seeking medical care.
Even as news emerged that 87 per cent of Covid cases in Hyderabad were of the Omicron variety with the rest being the more virulent and potentially dangerous Delta variant, major government-run hospitals in the city continued to report increasing Covid infections among its staff, straining their ability to provide services to patients.
Among the hardest hit were the Gandhi Hospital, and the Osmania General Hospital where, between the two, 123 medics were found to have contracted Covid. The highest number of doctors at these hospitals to catch the disease was house surgeons who numbered 45, followed by 39 MBBS students, 33 post-graduate students, and 6 faculty members. While Gandhi Hospital had 44 of its health care staff were hit by Covid, in Osmania 79 of its staff caught the disease.
Incidentally, Gandhi Hospital had been a Covid only specialist centre until the subsiding of the second wave of the disease while Osmania Hospital continued to offer its services to all patients ever since the pandemic arrived in Telangana in the form of a lone Covid-19 case on March 2, 2020.
Meanwhile, the number of active Covid cases in the state shot past the 15,000 mark to stand at 16,496 on Tuesday, even as the department said Telangana recorded 1,920 new cases of the disease, with two more people succumbing to it.
The number of Covid tests in the state inched towards the one lakh mark with 83,153 tests reported for the day from across the state. The department, however, said that it was awaiting results of 15,969 tests, which meant that one out of every 34 tests for which results were available, turned out to be a Covid positive person.
In the GHMC limits, the department said 1,015 new cases were reported, with the second highest number of 209 coming from the neighbouring Medchal-Malkajgiri district, followed by 159 in Ranga Reddy district.
Cases also rose in most other districts of the state with health officials warning that people travelling to their native places from Hyderabad for the Sankranti festival would carry the disease and spread it in other parts of the state. They said a serious surge in cases could be seen a few days after the Sankranti festival from across Telangana.
