Mental hospital screens patients, staff; no +ve case found

Nagpur: After a number of inmates in of Nagpur Central Jail were found Covid positive, authorities at the Regional Mental Hospital in the city too carried out scanning of their patients. So far no positive case has been found.
At present, over 450 patients are undergoing treatment here. Corona tests were carried out on over 70 patients and 30 staffers who attend to them. They were identified on the basis of symptoms.Apart from them, cases coming from containment zones and patients brought to the hospital on being found wandering on the streets were also tested.
All of them were found negative. One of them included a female patient brought from a quarantine centre in the city, said the hospital superintendent Dr Madhuri Thorat.
“The highest risk was among the patients found wandering on the streets. They are more susceptible to infection as they are likely to have come in contact with a number of persons,” she said.
The distancing norms and other protocols are being strictly followed both inside the hospital and the outpatient department (OPD), she said.
Soon after the outbreak, the hospital had stopped discharging the patients as part of the lockdown. Those cured had to extend their stay in the hospital. However, such patients get restless and need to be sent home earliest, said Thorat.
Two weeks ago, the hospital started a facility to drop the recovered patients to their respective places. Over 30 patients have been dropped home in ambulances. Most of them belonged to places within the district. One was from Bihar. In this case, the relatives had sent a vehicle to Nagpur, said the superintendent.
“Apart from places in the Vidarbha, mental hospital at Nagpur also gets patients not from nearby states like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. We had a patient from as far as Nepal. A woman, she was sent back over two months ago. She had boarded a train at Kolkata and landed at Nagpur,” said Thorat.
Even the patient sent from quarantine centre had no kin in Nagpur and her parents were traced in Balaghat.