Mahindra asks Japan, caught in Covid wave, to follow ‘Mumbai model’
The Supreme Court recently praised the management of medical oxygen in Mumbai and recommended that Delhi replicate the ‘Mumbai model’ to fight the pandemic
Industrialist Anand Mahindra has urged Japanese authorities to follow the ‘Mumbai model’, saying everyone must understand that the pandemic can only be defeated by mounting a collective effort to “heal the world together”.
Japan has till May 26 reported 721,912 cases and 12,398 fatalities. The total count in the country on May 22 was 709, 233. On May 25, it had a daily case count of 2,715.
Mahindra has frequently spoken on social media about the pandemic and offered suggestions or retweeted ideas that others should follow. On Tuesday (May 25), he shared a report saying that hospitals in Japan’s Osaka, a large port city and a commercial centre similar to Mumbai, are running out of beds and ventilators during a fresh wave of the pandemic.
The chairman of Mahindra Group also asked people to stop “India-bashing”, suggesting nothing of value could be added to the fight against the virus by doing so.
Also read: Be prepared for third wave of COVID-19: SC tells Centre
The Supreme Court recently praised the management of medical oxygen in Mumbai and recommended that Delhi replicate the ‘Mumbai model’ to fight the pandemic. “The Bombay Municipal Corporation is doing some great work, with no disrespect to Delhi. What they are doing, how they are managing, we can learn from them,” the apex court said.
The Mumbai model hinged on the rational use of medical oxygen and conserving supplies. Hospitals were told to plug leakages, if any. Coronavirus cases in Mumbai, Maharashtra’s pandemic epicentre, started to peak in February this year. On April 4, the city counted its highest single-day surge of 11,206 new cases.
Also read: India reports 2.08L COVID cases; conducts highest single-day tests of 22.17L
The ‘war rooms’ – control centres where doctors, medical interns and professionals track hospital beds on a live tracker and allot them to patients, many with depleting oxygen saturation – were at a breaking point.
Over the past few days, Mumbai has been recording a fall in the number of infections. On May 25, it reported 1,037 new cases with the recovery rate in the city at 94 per cent. On May 13, the daily case count was 1,946.
The credit for the crisis management has gone to the Mumbai civic body. The city’s crisis teams networked with hospitals and moved around surplus oxygen from one place to another that was struck by a shortage. The civic body installed nearly 24 liquid medical oxygen (LMO) tanks in its COVID-19 facilities, half of which remained unused during the first wave. But this infrastructure came in handy when the second wave hit the city.
