Bhubaneswar creates paid isolation facility for Covid patients in OYO rooms
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BHUBANESWAR: The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation has signed an agreement with OYO guesthouses and hotels to treat them as paid isolation facilities in the city to house aysmptomatic Covid positive persons.
So far, three such hotels with total 37 rooms are available. The BMC said Covid positive patient but clinically assigned as asymptomatic van only avail the paid isolation facility.
“The minimum number of days up to which asymptomatic patients can avail the isolation facility is 10 days from the day of sample collection. Such patients have to go for seven days of home quarantine after leaving the paid isolation facility,” said the BMC order. It added that the patients will have to pay 50 per cent of the hotel room tariff in advance in for the number of days he is required to stay in one go.
The capital city on Wednesday broke all its previous records and reported 370 Covid positive cases forcing the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) to bring two more slums under containment, where 25 cases together have been detected. The last time single day spike was 277.
Out of 370 cases, 204 were reported from quarantine (home and institutional) and rest local cases. The BMC again put out a message on its twitter handle urging people not to panic as testing has been ramped up and so are the high cases.
“BMC has ramped up testing aggressively in order to ensure screening more & more people in the city. This may result in detection of more number of positive cases. After the detection of positive cases, all of them are contacted & asymptomatic cases are allowed for #HomeIsolation,” the tweet said.
With fresh cases, the city’s Covid count jumped to 6077. With 3840 recoveries and 30 deaths, the city now has 2202 active cases. On Wednesday, 150 patients were discharged from Covid hospitals.
The BMC said on Thursday, the total test will cross one lakh mark as till Wednesday, it has tested 97,779 people. In past six days, 14223 samples have been tested that include antigen and RT-PCR. “We have taken the daily testing to 3,000. In the coming days, daily testing will touch 5,000,” said an officer of BMC.