30-bed isolation wards set up in Gurugram

To re-assure the residents after 14 coronavirus-affected Italian tourists were admitted to Medanta Hospital here on Wednesday, the Gurugram district administration said on Thursday it was ready to tackle the disease.

The administration has set up 20-bed and 10-bed isolation wards at sector 10 civil hospital and poly clinic at sector 31, respectively.

"We have adequate testing kits, tissues at both the government-run hospitals and patients will be treated by the dedicated team of doctors," said Gurugram civil surgeon B.K. Rajora.

Other hospitals had also been asked to set up isolation wards and inform the district administration as well as the Union Health Ministry about that, Rajora said.

Following the reports of black marketing of respiratory masks and hand sanitisers, a team had been set up to monitor medical supply, he added.

While the coronavirus scare has lowered footfalls at Metro stations, many multi-national companies have allowed their employees to work from home.

"We have distributed respiratory masks and hand sanitisers to employees and allowed them work from home if they felt ill. We have allowed exemption from biometric attendance," said Lokesh Agrawal, CEO of a Maneser-based food processing company.

Rupesh Dev, director of a BPO company said, "We have allowed not healthy employees the option to work from home. Those who don't want to avail car-pooling option provided by the company, or public transport to reach office, been allowed to work from home."

Attendance at Gurugram offices must have declined 35-55 per cent in Gurugram, according to Raju Travel Agency, a cab operator.

"We provide 350 cabs to an MNC in cyber city. The company HR manager has asked me to send only 150 cabs on weekend and around 180 cabs on normal working days as majority of employee has been allowed to work from home.

"We are planning to attach the remaining cabs with aggregator companies to keep our driver busy," said Sunil Maan, manager at Raju Travel Agency in sector 15.

Dinesh Vashistha, RWA president of sector 5 and assistant fire officer at Maruti Suzuki India, said, "we have decided to play Holi of flowers with limited people as large gathering may allow virus to transmit from one to another."

To tackle shortage of face masks and hand sanitisers, he said as a fire officer "I would suggest people to use wet handkerchief to cover face. It's more than effective compared with world class face masks. We use wet handkerchiefs during fire to avoid inhaling smoke. Smoke can instantly make any person unconscious." IANS