Mumbai: After two staff nurses from Dadar's Sushrusha Hospital tested positive for coronavirus on Friday, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has directed the hospital management to discharge or shift all patients out of the hospital within 48 hours.
The civic body has also asked the hospital management to quarantine all 28 staff nurses and test their swab samples at the earliest.
Meanwhile, a 59-year-old man from Mahim, who is a regular dialysis patient at Sushrusha Hospital, also tested positive for COVID-19 on Friday evening. Following this, the BMC authorities have shut down the hospital and directed that new admissions should be halted immediately.
With this move, the Dadar hospital becomes the eighth in the city to be sealed over the past week due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Assistant Municipal Commissioner of G (North) ward Kiran Dighavkar said, "Two nurses from Sushrusha Hospital, aged 27 and 42, have tested positive for COVID-19.
Following this, as a preventive step, we have asked the hospital to test and quarantine all its 28 nurses. We have asked them to stop taking new admissions."
The BMC has now advised the hospital management to test all their nurses at their own cost and at their premises. "We will take a call after the test results arrive," added Dighavkar.
While the civic body has already asked the hospital to discharge all the patients within 48 hours, those needing medical help will be shifted to other hospitals. The hospital management and BMC officials, however, refused to disclose where the patients would be shifted to.
The BMC has already sealed a few private hospitals, including Jaslok Hospital at Pedder Road and Wockhardt Hospital at Mumbai Central, and quarantined their staff after coronavirus cases were found on their premises.
The number of coronavirus cases in Dadar has reached six, with three new cases on Friday. This includes the two nurses and an 83-year-old man, who is a resident of Kelkar Road in Dadar.
Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 cases in Mahim reached three, including a death. Two new cases were reported from Mahim on Friday -- the dialysis patient from Sushrusha Hospital, and a 27-year-old nurse working with Breach Candy hospital who lived in the Vanjewadi nurse's hostel in Mahim.
She is the second nurse from Breach Candy staying in the hostel to have contracted the virus. Meanwhile, a 43-year-old butcher, a resident of Mahim who tested positive for Covid 19 on April 8, succumbed to the disease on Friday.
The deceased owned a mutton shop at Jijamata Nagar in Worli. "We are tracing contacts of all these patients and putting them under home quarantine or sending them to institutional isolation centres. For Sushrusha, we are tracking how many patients came in contact with the nurses and how the nurses contracted the virus," Dighavkar said.
