Mumbai, India’s financial hub and the epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak, is converting several of its iconic structures into quarantine facilities as it races to prepare for a predicted peaking of infections this month.
From a new hospital being built just a short stroll away from the U.S. Consulate building and the India offices of Citigroup Inc. to quarantine centers being set up in a nature park and planetarium, the metropolis is readying 100,000 beds, or about five times the current number of positive diagnoses.
The goal is to be able to treat and isolate at least 75,000 cases, a projection based on last month’s data when the cases were doubling almost every week, said Ashwini Bhide, additional commissioner at Mumbai’s municipal corporation. The pace has since slowed amid the world’s strictest lockdown and, “while we are unlikely to touch those projections by the end of May, we continue to plan for the worst case scenario,” she added.
Mumbai’s race against time spotlights the challenges for the densely populated Asian nation, which has failed to flatten its virus curve despite the harsh shelter-at-home restrictions. Home to globe-trotting executives and poor migrant laborers living in tiny slum shanties, Mumbai, like New York city, is fertile ground for the highly infectious pathogen.
A Twitter video earlier this month showed a hospital ward allegedly in Mumbai’s Lokmanya Tilak Hospital where corpses of virus victims tied in black plastic sheets were left on beds next to infected patients. The newly added facilities aim to remedy that.
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