BENGALURU: While the sharp decline in overall bed occupancy across Karnataka is a welcome change from desperate cries requesting for treatment witnessed in May, the percentage of patients occupying critical-care beds, especially in Bengaluru, continues to be a cause for concern.
The situation outside of the city is only better.
In Bengaluru, 80% of all patients undergoing treatment under the government quota across private and public facilities are occupying critical-care beds – high dependency units (HDUs), ICUs and ICUs with ventilators – requiring oxygen.
Comparatively, cumulative data for all other districts shows that around 62% of the patients in hospitals are in such beds.
As of 6pm Sunday, nearly 5,700 of the 7,200+ patients undergoing treatment at hospitals are occupying such beds in Bengaluru.
According to data from BBMP bed management system, 1,700 (80%) of the 2,204 patients undergoing treatment under the government quota across private and public facilities are in critical-care beds, while Private Hospitals and Nursing Homes Association (PHANA) said that more than 70% (over 4,000) of the 5,000+ patients being treated under the private quota were critical.
Among critically ill, districts have a higher proportion of patients in ICUPHANA president Dr HM Prasanna said: “There are about 5,000 Covid patients in non-government quota beds in private hospitals.
Of these, around 70% to 80% are in HDU and ICU beds.
In big hospitals, 90% of the ICUs are occupied.” Separate data from the state war room for districts outside Bengaluru shows that nearly 21,000 patients were occupying hospital beds as of June 11 — districts’ data is not compiled real-time as done in Bengaluru.
Of these, more than 13,000 or 62% are occupying critical care beds.
In Bengaluru, 55% of those in critical-care beds were in HDUs and the rest in the two categories of ICU beds, while 43% of the critical patients in the districts occupied HDUs.
This means that among the critically ill, districts have a higher proportion of patients in the ICU.
Overall bed occupancy across the state has declined significantly in the past two weeks.
In Bengaluru, only 16.5% of the 13,293 beds dedicated for Covid under government quota were occupied as of Sunday evening, while around 50% of the beds in private quota were occupied.
In comparison, all other districts together, where cases began surging after they peaked in Bengaluru, have 33% of the 63,761 beds occupied.
The dip in occupancy coincides with the discharge cycle kicking in, which has, in turn, seen a reduction in active cases.
Active cases across the state dipped below 2 lakh for the first time since the third week of April, from where it had skyrocketed to even cross the 6-lakh mark in mid-May.
Further, the reduction in active cases has resulted in a dip in oxygen requirement across districts.
As per the oxygen war room data, on June 11 — the latest available information on oxygen — the state consumed only 516.4 MT of oxygen.
While daily oxygen consumption was hovering around 700MT at the end of May, it dipped to 640MT on June 4.
From there, it has remained under 600MT/day on all days.
Between June 5 and June 11, the highest consumption happened on June 6 (593MT) and the lowest was on June 10 (426MT).