Government estimates go wrong, over 1,000 COVID patients on oxygen support
HYDERABAD: The third wave of Covid-19, driven by the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus is just about to take off in Telangana, and in a clear indication of how things might shape up in the next few weeks to come, the number of Covid patients requiring oxygen support on Tuesday shot past the 1,000 mark to stand at 1,033. This is in addition to an uptick in the number of patients requiring hospital admissions, as well as specialised attention in intensive care units.
According to the state health department, Telangana has a total of 56,370 beds for Covid patients in private and government hospitals. And it repeatedly claimed that not more than one per cent of all infected people would require hospitalisation, holding out the hope that the Omicron variant would only cause very mild to mild symptoms and 90 per cent of people getting infected would not even be aware that they caught the disease. Of the rest, some may have mild symptoms and home care along with isolation would suffice while just one per cent would require hospitalisation, the department said.
However, the rapid rise in hospital admissions in the past week shows that the health department may have overestimated the simplicity of the infection caused by the Omicron variant. On Tuesday, the total number of beds in hospitals occupied by Covid patients in Telangana was 2,519, or 4.47 per cent of the 56,370 hospital beds the department claims are available for Covid patients in the state.
Also disturbingly, more and more doctors, post graduate and MBBS students working in hospitals are falling prey to Covid with around 500 of them reported to have contracted the disease in the past week or so.
Even as the number of people seeking hospital admissions in the state is rising each day, the department reported a sharp spike in daily cases on Tuesday with 2,983 fresh Covid-19 infections, up from 2,447 on Monday. Two more people also died from the disease on Tuesday taking the official Covid death toll to 4,062 in Telangana.
Meanwhile, Covid cases continued to surge across 30 districts in Telangana on Tuesday for the second day in a row with Hyderabad city, along with the rest of the GHMC area with 1,206 cases accounting for most of Tuesday’s new cases. Medchal-Malkajgiri district had 259 cases, followed by Ranga Reddy with 227 cases.
Hanamkonda district, formerly Warangal Urban, joined the list of districts with three-digit Covid cases reporting 118 cases on Tuesday, up from 80 on Monday. Following Hanamkonda was Sangareddy with 96 cases, Peddapalli with 81, Khammam with 77, and Mancherial with 75 cases, as per the official daily Covid-19 bulletin released by the state health department.
