Mumbai’s Kasturba Hospital has been crowded with people looking to get tested for the Coronavirus Disease or COVID-19, despite government and health advisories to the residents against doing so. Naturally, this has caused quite a bit of concern for the medical staff at the hospital. Thankfully, things are going to get better with private testing labs now permitted to collect swabs required for testing from people’s homes.
This will be a part of the BMC’s home screening process, which will involve testers from private agencies going to homes individually to collect their samples. The BMC Commissioner, Praveen Pardeshi said that samples will be collected based on the symptoms shown by the family or members of the family, their detailed recent travel histories and based on info as to whether they’ve come in contact with a foreigner while overseas or in India.
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“The patient can be in-home quarantine or in more serious cases, he/she will be asked to move to a designated isolation facility,” a BMC official added.
The commissioner mentioned that these steps were taken largely to reduce the flow of patients at hospitals like Kasturba which reportedly saw around 800 patients lining up on March 20, most of whom could’ve well been potential carriers of the virus.
This is precisely why the state has gone into lockdown with all services currently shut across Mumbai while essential services continue to remain open. It is quite baffling, however, that public transport services like BEST buses remain operational. However, there have been reports of BEST conductors asking passengers with the home quarantine seal on their arms to leave the bus.
As of today, the total positive cases of the deadly virus in Maharashtra have risen to 89, which makes it all the more important for people to stay indoors and reduce the risk of catching the virus as well as passing it onto others.
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