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Two hospitals each with a capacity of up to 1,000 beds are to be build in Istanbul, Turkey, to treat coronavirus patients, the country’s president has said, according to AFP.
In a televised speech, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey had mobilised all its resources to fight the pandemic, which has so far claimed 649 lives in the country. Announcing the hospitals, he said:
We will complete them within 45 days and will open them to public service
With the measures we have taken, and the additional ones, we will overcome this pandemic together with Europe and the world.
Cox’s Bazaar, the district of Bangladesh that is home to more than 3million people – including a million Rohingya refugees – has no ventilators to treat people who fall ill with Covid-19, according to Save the Children.
The NGO is calling for urgent international help to help Bangladesh meet a potential surge in demand for critical care beds as the coronavirus spreads in the region. Hospitals in Bangladesh currently have 1,169 beds in intensive care units, the Dhaka Tribune reports. However most are concentrated in urban centres.
Without access to intensive care facilities in Cox’s Bazar, patients in critical condition may have to be transported to neighbouring Chittagong district more than 90 miles away, further increasing the risk to them and others.
Ventilators and people trained to operate them are urgently needed to protect the host communities and Rohingya refugees to avert a humanitarian disaster. Children are at serious risk of not only contracting the virus, but also of being orphaned or neglected if family members become infected or die.
At present, it is difficult for Bangladesh to meet the expected surge in demand for ventilators to help respond to the Covid-19 outbreak. We are in this together – no single country can confront Covid-19 alone, even the richest and most powerful among us.
… It is therefore essential that world leaders – in particular the G20 countries – commit to a coordinated global plan underpinned by debt relief. We also urge the Bangladesh government to engage the public and private sectors urgently to secure ventilators for COVID-19 patients.
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