Many health clinics run by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation have said separate slots cannot be provided to the recipients of the second dose of Covid vaccines who have taken their first jabs at private hospitals.
An official of the civic body said on Thursday that they were fearing law and order problems if such recipients were given priority over residents of the respective areas, who are queuing up from very early in the morning for the jab. It will not be possible to provide separate time slots to these recipients. Most of the clinics are located in residential neighbourhoods and hundreds of people are queuing up for the vaccine. If a group is given preferential treatment, then there can be law and order problems, the official said.
Hospitals in the city want to increase the number of critical care beds for Covid patients but a shortage of ventilators is one reason they are unable to do that fast, officials said.
Since most patients infected with the new strain of the virus and admitted to ICUs need to be put on a ventilator, hospitals said adding ICU beds without the device would not make sense.
But getting ventilators, imported or produced in the country, is taking three weeks to one month.
The waiting period was two weeks in the pre-Covid times. Hospitals said the period should have been reduced given the severity of the second wave of infections in the country, but the opposite is happening.
A crisis of critical care beds for Covid patients is resulting in many patients with severe symptoms being refused admission or treated in general wards where their condition is deteriorating to a stage beyond recovery, said doctors and health officials.
On May 11, 2020, a couple of months into the pandemic, Bengal had 907 critical care beds for Covid patients across the state.
On May 11, 2021, the state had 2,711 critical care beds for such patients, almost three times the count a year before but the crisis, too, has intensified by many notches.
Doctors and health officials said the virus had become more transmissible and was causing severe disease in many more patients compared with last year.
The state government has provided private hospitals with a list of government-run Covid vaccination centres in the city where they can send recipients of Covid vaccines who have taken their first dose at their units and are awaiting the second.
A letter sent to the heads of private Covid vaccination centres on Friday had a list of 173 government-run vaccination centres.
Thousands of people who took their first Covid shot at private hospitals are calling up the hospitals every day asking when they would get their second dose.
All private hospitals stopped Covid vaccination on May 1, the day the new vaccination policy of the Centre took effect. In the new system, private hospitals have to procure vaccine doses directly from manufacturers.
The RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences had around 350 patients at its OPD on Wednesday. The number fell to around 200 on Thursday.
AMRI Hospitals Dhakuria, too, witnessed a drop in the OPD footfall by 50 per cent on Thursday, compared with Wednesday.
“The OPD footfall had started picking up and almost became like it used to be during the pre-Covid period in February and March. Then we were having around 1,200 patients coming for consultations daily, including people from Bangladesh and various districts of Bengal. By April it started dipping because of the fresh surge in Covid,” said R. Venkatesh, regional director, east, Narayana Health, of which the RN Tagore hospital is the flagship unit.