A healthcare worker collects a swab sample from a man at a metro station, in New Delhi, November 9, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Anushree Fadnavis.
New Delhi: The third wave of COVID-19 transmission through the national capital appears to be claiming more lives than the first two: over 870 in the last fortnight and nearly 90 in the last 24 hours alone.
The noticeably sharp rise in the number of COVID-19 cases in the last month has prompted the Delhi government to request the Centre’s help with increasing the number of beds in the city’s hospitals. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has also approached the Delhi high court seeking a vacation of a stay the court had imposed on his government’s September 22 order – to have 33 private hospitals reserve 30% of their ICU beds for COVID-19 patients.
The high court acquiesced on November 12, but added that the ground situation was “more critical” than the government was prepared to acknowledge. The bench of Justices Hima Kohli and Subramonium Prasad also asked Kejriwal to explain how his team selected the 33 hospitals: “What is the density exercise that you have conducted? Is it a random selection? What is the density exposure and how many of the hospitals have been reserved in the Central district of the city, with the fourth [seroprevalence] survey report showing increase in the cases? How have the beds been divided?”
Additional solicitor general Sanjay Jain, who represented the Delhi government, submitted that the government had used three parameters. According to him, these hospitals together had more ICU beds – 2,217 – than all the others combined (1,051). Second, these hospitals were the most popular among residents, and third, they had the ability to treat COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients separately at the same facility.
Jain also told the court that the Delhi government had lined up 20 ambulances, with 60 more in the works, to transport patients to the new Radha Soami Beas Satsang medical facility in Chattarpur, with 10,500 beds.
Delhi currently has 8,000 beds, according to Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain. However, he said the problem pertains mostly to the availability of ICU beds at private hospitals. According to him, of the 30,000 or so active cases, around 80% of patients have quarantined themselves at home while the remainder required hospitalisation.
A day earlier, and similarly concerned about Delhi’s surging COVID-19 epidemic, the same high court bench had wondered why the city was relaxing the curbs on mobility and certain activities.
It raised the question after the Delhi government submitted the report of the city’s fourth seroprevalence survey, which indicated that nearly 25% of those tested had been exposed to the novel coronavirus.
“One in four persons in the city appears to be infected by COVID-19 and … the virus has touched almost every household in the national capital,” the bench remarked.
Meanwhile, health minister Jain expressed hope that the number of COVID-19 cases will start to decline after about a week. “The average (number of new cases) over the past one week has been the highest in three months,” he told journalists at a press briefing, adding that the test positivity rate was 13%.
However, he downplayed questions about whether the virus was moving through a previously uninfected population and instead speculated the surge could be the result of more testing. “Yesterday, we conducted 60,000 to 64,000 tests. So the number of tests has also peaked.”
In the meantime, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has accused Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party government of not doing enough to curb air pollution, which it said was also responsible for the urban epidemic’s renewed vigour.
BJP Delhi president Adesh Gupta called the city’s air-quality situation “alarming”, and added the Delhi government has failed to install the promised number of ‘smog towers’, introduce electric buses, plant the requisite number of trees or properly implement the Graded Response Action Plan.