Sindh to see increase in oxygenated beds

The Sindh government, in a bid to enhance Covid-19 treatment, decided on Saturday to convert 8,672 beds in isolation centres to oxygenated beds for high dependency units (HDUs) and procure more ventilators.

In a meeting presided over by Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, it was also decided that more HDU beds, with high and low oxygen flow options, would be procured.

The equipment would be an addition to 530 ICU beds, each equipped with a ventilator, and 1,810 HDU beds in Sindh’s public hospitals.

Besides, the meeting agreed to carry out the conversion of over 8,000 beds in isolation facilities into HDU beds.

Targeted screening

Addressing the meeting, the CM said that since the government could not test everybody, it had decided to conduct targeted screening.

Pointing out that one-time screening was not sufficient to present a real picture given continued exposure of people to the virus, he said that the government, with its limited resources, had opted for targeted screening.

“We have to allocate resources so that minimum expenditure [with optimum results] is ensured,” the CM explained.

Lockdown

He also insisted that a lockdown was the only solution to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Giving the example of East district, he said that 247 active cases were reported in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and 214 in Jamshed Town on June 17, when a partial lockdown was reinforced in these localities. On July 2, when the lockdown was lifted, Gulshan-e-Iqbal reported 283 cases and Jamshed Town 90, while 66 people recuperated from the infection in the former and 187 in the latter, he added.

“This indicates that lockdown is the only way to contain the virus,” the CM observed.

Comparison

He also stated that Covid-19 mortality rate was 2.5 per cent nationwide, while it was just 1.6 per cent in Sindh. Meanwhile, the mortality rate is 3.62 per cent in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), 1.14 per cent in Balochistan, 1.82 per cent in Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B), 0.98 per cent in Islamabad and 2.3 per cent in Punjab, he added.

He maintained that of 125,094 patients recovered in Pakistan, over 50,000 were from Sindh.

Sindh and K-P have a recovery rate of close to 56 per cent, while Punjab’s recovery rate is 53 per cent, Islamabad’s 65 per cent, G-B’s 77 per cent, Balochistan’s 50 per cent and Azad Jammu Kashmir’s (AJK’s) 57 per cent, the CM said.

Referring to the provision of beds for Covid-19 patients, the CM said the province had allocated 10,985 beds for coronavirus patients, while Punjab had allocated 9,276, G-B 151, Balochistan 1,103 and AJK 918.

Besides, he said, over the past 33 days, Sindh conducted 300,247 tests while Punjab conducted just 286,049, K-P 93,377, Islamabad 90,557, G-B 5,100, Balochistan 26,008 and AJK 10,351.

He claimed that Sindh’s hospitals had separate wards for coronavirus patients and better facilities for their treatment in comparison to other provinces’ hospitals, and noted that Sindh was the only province that had established a separate hospital for Covid-19 patients.

The CM further said that 225,283 Covid-19 cases were reported in Pakistan, of which over 90,000 had emerged in Sindh.

Covid-19 update

Earlier, in a statement issued on the day, he said that 1,585 more coronavirus cases were reported in the province on Saturday and 42 more patients had succumbed to the virus.

He said that following this development, the province’s Covid-19 tally had soared to 92,306 and the death toll had reached 1,501.

The CM further stated that 1,480 more patients had recovered from the infection, raising the total number of recovered patients in the province to 52,388.

This leaves 38,417 patients under treatment, among whom 36,515 are home-isolated, 299 are in isolation centres and 1,603 in hospitals, he said, adding that among the patients under treatment, 733 were critically ill with 98 on ventilators.