Even as the COVID cases continue to rise, the district on Tuesday ran out of all ICU beds in its 56 government and private hospitals authorised to treat COVID patients. The district has 217 ICU beds earmarked for COVID patients.
For the second time this month, Anantapur district surpassed 2,000 cases in a span of 24 hours. Out of 8,683 samples tested, 2,168 returned positive taking the active case tally to 11,755. Of them, 2,116 are receiving treatment in hospitals, 673 in COVID Care Centres and the rest are in home isolation.
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The district administration has now notified another 73 hospitals for treating COVID patients to meet the ever-increasing demand. Out of over 1,100 oxygen-supported beds, the district is left with just 119 by 6 p.m. on Tuesday and the demand is increasing by minute.
However, the positivity rate, which was above 30% last week, has come down to 24.97% in the district.
Meanwhile, in view of the recent incidents of technical snags in oxygen supply leading to deaths in the Government General Hospital(GGH) and a hospital running out of oxygen in Hindupur, extra care was being taken by to check the functioning of the liquid medical oxygen tanks at the GGH.
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500-bed hospital to come up
Meanwhile, District Collector Gandham Chandrudu visited the site adjacent to the Arjas Steel Factory on the outskirts of Tadipatri in the district where the State government has planned to construct a temporary oxygen-supported 500-bed hospital.
The factory has an in-house production capacity of 100 kl of oxygen through air separation. The government wishes to utilise this facility for supplying oxygen directly to the proposed hospital by June 1.
They have three liquid oxygen storage tanks too on their factory premises and even those can be utilised in emergencies if refilling is done from quota allocated from Karnataka industries, he said.