Thirty of 58 Covid hospitals have zero bed-occupancy, says health department data

Ghaziabad: As the number of coronavirus disease cases have come down, beds in as many as 30 Covid hospitals in Ghaziabad out of a total of 58 are vacant, data from the district health department shows

Ghaziabad: As the number of coronavirus disease cases have come down, beds in as many as 30 Covid hospitals in Ghaziabad out of a total of 58 are vacant, data from the district health department shows. It also shows that ICU beds in as many as 39 Covid hospitals are vacant, as of figures till the morning of June 10.

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Private and government hospitals in the district were deployed to tackle the rush of patients during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, which began mid-April. A decreasing trend of cases was not seen before May 6, when the sample positivity rate had peaked to 19.3%.

As of Thursday, the sample positivity rate had fallen to 0.40%

“The overall bed and ICU occupancy has reduced considerably at present, with fewer Covid patients in hospitals. It is now time that the government de-notifies these hospitals and allows them to resume routine, non-Covid patients. During this second wave, private hospitals worked tirelessly and took about 85-90% of the Covid-related workload. On the other hand, infrastructure in government hospitals should be improved before any likely third wave,” said Dr Ashish Agarwal, president of Indian Medical Association (Ghaziabad).

Going by the district’s health records of June 10, there are a total of 3,469 beds across the 58 hospitals, whose occupancy is about 199 (5.74% occupancy) at present. The records also indicate that 800 of these are ICU/ventilator beds whose occupancy is about 76 beds (9.5% occupancy) as of Thursday.

On May1, the overall bed occupancy was 83.54%, while 100% of ICU/ventilator beds were occupied. On June 1, however, the overall occupancy dropped down to 27.13%, while for ICU/ventilator beds it was 49.3%, as per district health records.

“The overall bed occupancy has fallen considerably since May 1, as cases have started to decline and are below the 600-mark. We hope the number of active cases comes down further. The bed availability has considerably improved but there are certain hospitals which are not updating their bed-availability data on a daily basis. We have asked them to update it soon,” said Dr NK Gupta, chief medical officer of the district.

“The de-notification of Covid hospitals (private hospitals offering paid Covid treatment) will be done upon directions of the state government. On our part, we have denotified the ESIC Hospital at Sahibabad and four of our community health centres. The out-patient and in-patient departments (OPD/IPD) services have been started here. For any likely next wave, we are focussing on creating paediatric ICU beds and improving infrastructure,” he added.

According to state control room figures of Thursday, the Ghaziabad district has the third highest number of active cases (437) in Uttar Pradesh, after Gorakhpur (516) and Lucknow (505).