Ghaziabad scales up Covid beds to about 1,500 as cases rise

Ghaziabad: The Ghaziabad administration has scaled up the number of beds in private and government hospitals to deal with an upsurge in Covid-19 cases in the district

Ghaziabad: The Ghaziabad administration has scaled up the number of beds in private and government hospitals to deal with an upsurge in Covid-19 cases in the district. Officials said that a total of 1,486 Covid-19 beds have been made available -- 968 in private hospitals and 518 in government facilities.

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“We have scaled up the beds in the district, and more would be arranged as and when required. At present, we have more than three times more beds available in comparison to the active cases. Of the 1,486 beds, we have 118 beds having ventilators and 223 ICU beds,” said Dr NK Gupta, chief medical officer.

According to the state’s daily Covid-19 bulletin, the district had 442 active cases till Wednesday morning. Out of 442 patients, 212 of them are in home isolation and 55 admitted to government hospitals while the rest taking up treatment in private hospitals, the officials said. At the end of March when the district had 309 active cases, about 400 beds were available for Covid-19 patients in the government hospitals, they said.

“The severity of infection is almost similar to what prevailed during the last year. Majority of the patients at present are asymptomatic and about 48% patients are in home isolation,” Gupta added.

District magistrate Ajay Shankar Pandey did not respond to calls.

Of the 518 Covid beds under the district administration, 400 are at Santosh Medical College which is an L3 category facility (for moderate patients), while 118 are at Sanjay Nagar government hospital which is an L2 category facility (for critical patients).

“We have 10 patients in our hospital and they have mild to moderate symptoms. We have put only one of them on oxygen as a precautionary measure,” said Dr Sanjay Teotia, chief medical superintendent of Sanjay Nagar hospital.

Meanwhile, Ghaziabad on Wednesday reported 76 fresh cases, taking the total number of positive cases in the district to 27,712, which included 102 deaths. So far, a total of 27,165 patients have been discharged in the district, as per the health bulletin.

Experts said that the present wave of infection is more contagious than the last year’s. “The infection is spreading fast. The spread is more as there is no check on movement of people and many are still not following precautions like social distancing or wearing of face mask,” said Dr VB Jindal, former president of Indian Medical Association (Ghaziabad).

“The good thing is that we have just about 5% cases which have gone to severe condition,” said Jindal.

To gauge the spread of infection in the district, the sample positivity rate in Ghaziabad during the month of March stood at 0.69% while it is now about 1.36% during first five days of April. Sample positivity rate refers to the number of samples testing positive per 100 samples tested. Sometimes patients take more than one test for confirmation and so, total positive samples can be higher than total positive cases, the officials explained.

The state officials said that UP has 31,987 active cases, besides 8,964 deaths and 604,979 patients discharged till April 7. “Of the total active cases, we have 18,679 patients who are in home isolation and 668 in private hospitals while the rest are taking up treatment in government health-care facilities,” said Amit Mohan Prasad, UP’s additional chief secretary (health).