How Mumbai admin is battling coronavirus as cases continue to spike

The city administration is trying to ramp up the isolation and treatment center capacities here as cases continue to spike

Mumbai is India's worst hit city - of the 552 new cases in Maharashtra on Sunday, the city alone accounted for 456 cases, the highest ever single day spike. So how is the city gearing up for fighting this crisis?

Mumbai is roughly testing 1,200-1,400 samples per day in a city of around 12 million. Shortage of both diagnostic and protective kits is a huge challenge in the city. A batch of antibody-based rapid diagnostic test kits were to reach the state around April 10, but has been delayed. This has forced the BMC to restrict its testing net to symptomatic or high risk contacts of Covid-19 positive patients mostly.
 

In fact, the municipality has issued a show-cause notice to Metropolis Healthcare, a private diagnostic lab, after it learnt that the lab was testing patients who were neither high risk contacts nor showing any symptoms of the novel coronavirus.

Meanwhile, the city administration is trying to ramp up the isolation and treatment center capacities as cases continue to spike. In the next three months, a three storey building will come up within the premises of Kasturba Hospital, which is at the heart of the city's battle against Covid-19. This new building will be erected using pre-engineered building technology that basically implies that parts of the building will be engineered at a factory and then assembled at the site. This new isolation facility will have 60 beds including ICU beds and even drug stores.

This is taking inspiration from Wuhan, where authorities had built two hospitals in just a fortnight.

One of the city's largest event venues, the National Sports Club of India's (NSCI) dome in Worli has been converted into a Covid-19 care centre and from Monday, it will start taking asymptomatic patients. So far, asymptomatic contacts of patients were sent home given that they had toilets inside their houses, or to schools, hotels and lodges for quarantining. NSCI now will accommodate 500 people and a team of ten doctors and 30 nurses. Worli, Prabhadevi and Lower Parel the city's worst affected areas housing hundreds of patients and their immediate contacts.
 

The Seven Hills hospital has already been converted into a dedicated Covid-19 facility. Corporates like Reliance Industries has provided for 100 beds in this hospital by creating infrastructure.

Meanwhile, BMC's overburdened staff have been given a much needed respite. 140,000 municipal workers, apart from doctors and nurses will now work for 14-days and get leave for the remaining 14-days.

Late Sunday night, Thane district adjoining Mumbai was declared as a containment zone. Apart from Thane, Navi Mumbai, Mira Bhayander, Kalyan Dombivali, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Ulhasnagar have all been classified as containment zones.

It is not easy to contain a disease as contagious as the new coronavirus in the world's fifth most densly populated city. Dharavi, for example, a 240-hectare slum pocket with 850,000 residents and a population density of 66,000 people per square km is one of the most cramped spaces in the city. It has over 130 cases and the city administration is losing their sleep on measures to contain the spread here.