5-Star Hotels in Mumbai Roped in By BMC to Operate as Covid-19 Facilities Starting Today

With hospital beds and ventilators in Mumbai hitting a 90 percent occupancy, the BMC on Thursday allowed private hospitals to make use of two five-star hotels as covid facilities to admit patients who are not critical.

As per sources, BMC is also on the lookout to set up an additional 2,000 beds comprising of both ICU and oxygen beds. The municipal body is planning to add more hotels wherein non-critical patients can be admitted to the list in the next few days, the Hindustan Times reported.

A circular devised by the BMC provided further information regarding the new facilities. It said that the hospitals will charge up to ₹4,000 which will include a charge of beds and meals. However, the medical expenses of the patient will be charged separately. In case there are two members from a family, they can share a twin sharing room for which the cost will be up to ₹6,000, the circular claimed.

The two five-star hotels will start operations as covid facilities from today, the Municipal Commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal told Hindustan Times.

He further added that 30 more ICU beds will be added to Seven Hills Hospital today, 250 Covid-19 beds in Jaslok Hospital will be made available with 40 separate ICU beds by Saturday while 1,500 additional oxygenated beds will be added in the NESCO jumbo centre in the next one week.

This decision was taken following an unabated rise in the Covid-19 cases in the state of Maharashtra. The state recorded 58,952 fresh Covid-19 infections and 278 deaths, pushing the tally to 3,578,160 and toll to 58,804. Notably, today is the ninth straight day of over 50,000 new cases, even as the state is in the midst of a 15-day curfew which began from 8 pm on Wednesday.

India on Thursday witnessed yet another record spike with 2,00,739 Cases and 1,038 Deaths in the last 24 hours. 5 states/UTs have so far reported more than 10k new Covid cases. 3 states have registered more than 1 lakh cases while 7 states/UTs have logged in more than 50k Covid-19 cases.

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