Pune mayor stresses improving health system rather than lockdown
Pune, 1 April 2021: Pune Mayor Murlidhar Mohol said that instead of going for lockdown, we need to improve upon the health system including increasing the vaccination drives, testing. Pune is one of the nine cities in the country which has the highest number of Covid-19 positive patients.
He also appealed to people above 45 years of old to get them inoculated. From today, the Centre has opened the vaccination program for people above the age of 45 years. Mohol said, “The fourth phase of vaccination program in the country has begun and the first three drives have received good response from the people. Senior citizens participated in it.
I appeal to people to get vaccinated. There is no dearth of vaccines in the city. There are 114 centers and so far 3.60 lakh people have got vaccinated. Yesterday we received 1.45 lakh vaccine doses from Centre. We have a target of 1 lakh people to be inoculated in the district. We have a target to inoculate 15,000 people every day. We need to improve the health care system.
It’s not that the cases are rising only in Pune. We want to conduct 16,000 tests per day in the city. We have 80% beds from private hospitals under our custody. The capacity of municipal hospitals has been raised from four hundred beds to 500 and we are trying to increase it till 800.
We are also trying to increase the beds and oxygen beds at Baner Covid care center. We have also decided to buy ventilators.
Even if the cases are increasing no need to worry as considering the mutations and speed of the Coronavirus, 90% of patients are in home isolation. Only 10% are in hospitals. We need to make the rules stricter to break the chain.
Lockdown is not the solution as lakhs of people will die without any work. It will increase unemployment. Instead, increase the rate of vaccination”, he said.
The state government has not given a single rupee to PMC in the last year. I don’t want to criticize anybody, but that is the truth. The state government must fund PMC otherwise PMC budget will topple over. We have spent Rs 200 to Rs 250 so far.
