Dedicated government Covid hospitals in the capital city of Dhaka have run out of their capacity to provide intensive care with all their intensive care unit beds occupied amid a relentless surge in novel coronavirus cases.

 
Dhaka Covid hospitals are last resort for coronavirus patients of the country’s 35 districts that lack ICUs that are scarcely available in the rest of the country.

Critical Covid patients have started rushing to Dhaka hospitals in large numbers since the beginning of July, after local and regional hospitals’ capacity exhausted, while the pressure on Dhaka hospitals has further intensified lately.

Even beds with central oxygen supply are now unavailable in most of the Dhaka hospitals, including the largest ones such as Dhaka North City Corporation and Dhaka Medical College Covid hospitals, contributing to the increase in the number of critical virus cases.

‘Our capacity has exhausted as if in the blink of an eye,’ DNCC Covid Hospital director Brig Gen AKM Nasir Uddin told New Age after confirming that all the hospital’s 212 intensive care and 300 high dependency beds have been occupied.
 
The situation at the DNCC Covid hospital, touted by the government as the best Covid treatment centre in the country, speaks of the volume of pressure the country’s Covid hospitals have been facing of late.

The DNCC institution had one third of its ICU beds vacant in the second week of July when about 60 patients came to the hospital seeking admission daily.

Like the other Covid hospitals, the DNCC facility only admitted critical patients requiring intensive care or high-flow oxygen to remain alive while trying to release as many patients daily as were admitted to keep beds vacant.

But still, the DNCC hospital had to admit 64 patients on Sunday by noon, 24 of them to the intensive care unit.

Now more than 100 patients seek admission to the DNCC hospital daily.

The DNCC set-up has 500 general beds to which so far the hospital authorities have avoided admitting patients as they lack access to central oxygen.

‘We are installing a new oxygen tank to bring the general ward under central oxygen supply,’ said Nasir.

Oxygen support is essential in Covid treatment and its availability can significantly reduce deaths by preventing mild cases from deteriorating.

On Sunday, the number of critical cases in the country stood at 1,296 which were among the 145,959 active cases the number of which has more than doubled in just a month.

 On June 27, there were 68,231 active cases in the country.

A total of 11,291 new cases were logged on Sunday while the test positivity rate has been around 30 per cent for about a month now.

Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital director Khalilur Rahman said that they would add 200 more beds to their Covid unit in a day or two to cope with the increased pressure of patients.

The 300-bed Covid hospital is almost full with its ICU beds occupied for about a month now.

But increasing the number of beds with central oxygen supply is not easy in the country’s hospitals designed keeping out of the mind patients needing oxygen supplement.

 
Kuwait Bangladesh Friendship Government Hospital is overflowing with patients, with dozens seeking admission daily to the institution.

The hospital’s ICU beds never remain vacant for more than a few minutes as once someone dies or recovers a long line of critical patients is there to occupy the vacated bed.

‘We can’t expand our capacity further for our central oxygen supply can’t be stretched anymore,’ said Mohammad Shihab Uddin, director, Kuwait Bangladesh Hospital.

The government has, however, continued to claim that the situation is under control and that 40 of the 393 ICU beds in the government hospitals are still not occupied.

The official statistics given to the media on Sunday showed that 11 ICU beds were still vacant at the DNCC Covid hospital while the other facilities with vacant ICU beds included the 250-bed TB hospital at Shyamoli, National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases, Sheikh Russel Gastroliver Institute and Hospital, Rajarbag Police Hospital and the TB hospital at Mohakhali.

New Age talked to the authorities of all but one of the hospitals with claimed vacant ICU beds and came to know that they did not have any vacant ICU beds.

The Rajarbag Police Hospital authorities could not be reached.

The official data even gave wrong figures of ICU beds.

For instance, the official estimate showed that the TB hospital in Mohakhali had 10 ICU beds and five of them were vacant.