With new discharge guidelines, Ghaziabad hopes for more vacant beds, better recovery rate

The health department officials said they are going to defer the opening of 200-bed Covid L1 hospital ( to treat non-critical cases) in Niwari as they expect more

The health department officials said they are going to defer the opening of 200-bed Covid L1 hospital ( to treat non-critical cases) in Niwari as they expect more beds to be vacated in the operational L1 hospitals in the wake of the government revising the discharge policy on June 19.

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This is for the second time in the past one month that the government has revised guidelines for discharge of Covid-19 patients.

At present, the Ghaziabad district has two operational L1 hospitals at Sahibabad (76 beds) and Nandgram (60 beds) while L2 hospital (100 beds) at Sanjay Nagar besides 400-bedded L3 category hospital of Santosh Hospital.

According to the new guidelines, an asymptomatic patient can be discharged, without having to undergo any test, on the 10th day from the date of admission. But, such persons will have to remain in home quarantine for seven days after discharge.

Currently, all symptomatic and asymptomatic patients are to be admitted to dedicated Covid hospitals in the state. Earlier, asymptomatic patients were discharged only if their test report came negative for Covid-19.

“We are expecting that more patients will get discharged from our L1 hospitals as the discharge guidelines have been changed. So we will delay the opening of our new L1 hospital in Niwari,” Dr NK Gupta, chief medical officer, Ghaziabad, said.

For discharge of patients with mild symptoms, the new guidelines state that they will have to be without symptoms for three consecutive days.

“Such patients will then undergo a test on the Tru-Net machine, either three days after showing no symptoms or on the 12th day from the date of admission, whichever is later. If their report is negative, they can be discharged. All patients showing moderate to severe symptoms will be referred to L2 or L3 hospitals, which are dedicated to treating more critical Covid-19 cases,” the CMO said.

The officials said until now, patients with mild/moderate or severe Covid-19 symptoms such as fever, cough, etc were also being discharged after a single negative test report.

“The revised guidelines will help us discharge more active cases in the coming days and this will reduce the burden on us to open new L1 hospitals. As a general observation, we have about 75-80% cases which are asymptomatic. So, there is a need to open more L1 hospitals. During the recent interactions will government appointed nodal officers, we have been asked to create bigger L1 hospitals will 200-400 bed capacity,” Dr Gupta said.

“With revised guidelines, we expect that our recovery rate will also go up,” he said.

As of now, the district health department had planned L1 hospitals at 13 different colleges with a combined capacity of about 4,000 beds in order to deal with any future surge in number of Covid-19 cases.

With the rising number of cases, especially in the month of June, the discharge rate of Ghaziabad district stands at 53.82% at present. On May 31, the recovery rate was 76.39%.

On the other hand, the current fatality rate is 5.01% (till June 19), while it was 1.31% on May 31.

“The government appointed nodal officers have stressed on reducing the death rate and increasing surveillance activities. For early detection of cases, we have come with help desk facilities where the general public will be scanned with infrared thermometers and pulse oxymeters. These help desks are at primary health centres, community health centres and government offices,” Ajay Shankar Pandey, district magistrate, said.

Till June 19, Ghaziabad has a total of 797 Covid-19 cases,with 328 of them till active, while 429 have been discharged so far. The death from the disease is 40.