The number of dengue cases in several city hospitals have started to drop, but doctors still advised caution.
A 37-year-old man from Howrah’s Panchla died at the Infectious Diseases And Beleghata General Hospital on Wednesday.
A source in the state government said that the man was admitted to the hospital on November 2 and had tested positive for dengue.
Some of the hospitals witnessed a rise in admissions after Durga Puja but there has again been a decline in hospital admissions in the last few days.
Peerless Hospital had about 40 dengue patients under treatment at the hospital about a month ago.
On Wednesday, there were 31 patients under treatment.
“We are still having two or three fresh dengue admissions every day,” said Sudipta Mitra, the chief executive officer of the hospital.
Chandramouli Bhattacharya, an infectious diseases specialist at the hospital, said he was hardly seeing any dengue patients in the clinic.
At the Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences (RTIICS), there were only four dengue patients under treatment on Wednesday.
“We had about 16 or 17 dengue patients under treatment a month ago. It dropped drastically during the Puja, rose a little few days after Puja. It has again dropped,” said R. Venkatesh, the chief operating officer of Narayana Health, which runs the RN Tagore Hospital.
“We have 10 patients admitted with dengue now, which is 40 per cent less than a month ago. Two fresh dengue admissions are taking place per day on an average currently, a slight dip compared to a week ago. This year due to rainfall till late October, dengue cases are expected to stretch till at least the third week of November,” said Rupali Basu, Managing Director & CEO, Woodlands Multispeciality Hospital Ltd.
A source in the KMC said over 4,000 dengue cases were reported in Kolkata in the three weeks leading up to October 29.
“In the first two weeks, the number of fresh weekly infections were 1,300 or more. It dropped by a few hundreds in the third week,” said the KMC official.
“But it is still too early to say if the numbers have started to drop. If we see that number of fresh infections drop steadily in the next two or three weeks too, we can say that the worst may be over this year,” he said.
Mayor Firhad Hakim had said on Friday that 11,441 dengue cases were reported
in Kolkata this year, till October 29.
A special cleanliness drive was taken up across the state in October before Puja to spot and destroy sources of mosquito breeding.
KMC officials said that on a year before Covid pandemic, dengue cases had gone up drastically during November.
“If it does not rain further, it seems fresh cases will go down. But if it rains, the situation might change,” added the official.
