MUMBAI: More than 10,000 people, including some coronavirus patients, were moved to safer locations Tuesday as India's west coast braced for a cyclone, the first such storm to threaten Mumbai in more than 70 years.

Authorities in India's financial capital, which is struggling to contain the pandemic, evacuated nearly 150 COVID-19 patients from a recently built field hospital to a facility with a concrete roof as a precautionary measure, officials said.

The chief minister of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, said people living in flimsy homes near the shore were being moved to safer places before Cyclone Nisarga makes its scheduled landfall on Wednesday afternoon or evening.

"Slum-dwellers... in low-lying areas have been instructed to evacuate," Uddhav Thackeray said in a message posted by his office on Twitter. Mumbai has rarely faced the brunt of cyclones - the last severe storm to hit the city struck in 1948, killing 12 people and injuring more than 100.