Chennai, April 30(BPNS)

Tamil Nadu has formed a Unified Command Centre (UCC) to manage bed availability in coordination with all the departments and directorates to manage the availability of beds. The command centre will function at the office of the National Health Mission( NHM).

This is mainly to co-ordinate the bed availability for critically ill patients as well as the Oxygen cylinder requirements in private hospitals. A new twitter handle@104GoTN will be launched to support people in need of beds and all the requests will be handled in coordination with the Unified Command Centre(UCC).  The hashtag#BedsForTN will also be introduced to maximize the reach.

The health department has already directed the private hospitals to reserve 50% of the beds for Covid care and asked to postpone elective surgeries by ten days. It may be noted that 15 of the 100 people tested for Covid 19 have tested positive in Chennai, Tirunelveli and Tuticorin with 17897 fresh cases in the state and 107 deaths reported on Thursday, the situation in the state is grave.

This is the first time in 2021 that the state’s death tally has crossed the three digit mark and Chennai city reported 40 deaths due to Covid-19.34 of the total 37 districts of the state have reported more than 100 fresh cases in a single day onThursday and 22 districts reported deaths.