By Aakanksha KhajuriaNew Delhi, April 4 : Amid massive surge in coronavirus cases in the national capital, the hospitals are now witnessing increase in admissions of patients, with Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital administration asserting that more patients with ‘severe’ infection are now getting admitted.
The capital city has recorded a nine-fold spike in coronavirus cases in the last three weeks.
It recorded over 3,500 new cases in the last 24 hours, as opposed to 407 cases on March 15.Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has admitted that the fourth wave of the pandemic is raging, but ruled out imposition of a lockdown.
“Hospital admissions have increased in the last three to four days.Most of the patients which are now visiting our hospital are severe cases.
However, it cannot be said that the deaths are also increasing in the hospital,” said Dr.Ritu Saxena, Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of LNJP.
The Chief Medical Officer further said that the hospital, which was one of the largest Covid-19 hospitals last year, has proper infrastructure in place to deal with the increase in admissions of Covid-19 patients.“We currently have 300 beds,” she told IANS.
After the cases in the national capital came down in December, various hospitals in the city, including LNJP, were turned into non-Covid facilities.LNJP earlier had 2,000 Covid-19 beds.“The beds will further be scaled up if there is a massive surge in coronavirus cases in the capital,” said Saxena.
Besides LNJP, another Delhi government-run Rajiv Gandhi Super Specialty Hospital is also witnessing a surge in admissions.However, only those with severe and moderate symptoms are being admitted, those with milder infection are being sent to home for isolation.
“There is a huge spike in admission in the last few days.There are, however, no queues being formed in the hospital.There are less deaths –- one per day.Before this surge, the hospital was recording zero deaths per day,” Dr.Chhavi Gupta, spokesperson of the hospital said.
RML Director and Medical Superintendent Dr.Rana Anil Kumar Singh also said that the hospital is ready to tackle the increase in the number of admissions in the coming days.
Currently, 434 Covid-19 beds out of 500 beds are available in the Rajiv Gandhi Super Specialty Hospital, while 202 out of 300 are vacant in the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital.RML has 138 vacant beds out of 172 in total.
According to ‘Delhi Corona’ application, 48 per cent of the Intensive care unit (ICU) beds with ventilators, which are extremely crucial for patients with severe disease, are occupied in the city.
About 404 Covid ICU beds with ventilators out of 791 are vacant, 784 ICU beds without ventilators out of 1,293 and 3,527 normal Covid beds out of 6,023 are available, as per the data on April 3 at 6 p.m.
Besides this, 52 out of 78 private hospitals are running low on ICU beds with ventilators.Only four beds are available in Delhi Government’s Burari Hospital.This shows that the city is unprepared to deal with a major surge at the moment.
The positivity rate also mounted to 4.48 per cent from 4.1 per cent a day before.The recovery rate is 96.47 per cent, whereas the death rate is 1.65 per cent.Positivity rate is the percentage of samples that test positive for disease out of the total samples tested.
At present, there are 12,647 active coronavirus cases in Delhi.Over 6.48 lakh patients have recovered from the virus.This includes 2,904 patients who have been discharged in the last 24 hours.
(Aakanksha Khajuria can be contacted at aakanksha.k@ians
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