Arvind Kejriwal hails Lok Nayak hospital’s services in Covid fight

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday inaugurated a video-calling facility for patients at Lok Nayak hospital, the city’s largest dedicated Covid-19 facility.

Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday inaugurated a video-calling facility for patients at Lok Nayak hospital, the city’s largest dedicated Covid-19 facility.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal (ANI photo)

Commending the hospital after it completed 100 days as a Covid-designated facility, Kejriwal said the Delhi government would work with the staff and administration to ensure any shortcomings were overcome.

“Lok Nayak hospital has completed 100 days of treatment of Covid-19 patients. This is the biggest Covid-19 hospital in the country and over the past 100 days, 2,700 patients with severe symptoms have recovered and gone home. The doctors and staff have worked without worrying about their own health. They are doing a great job. Lok Nayak has started providing plasma therapy on a larger scale now, which has helped in reducing the deaths reported from the hospital,” Kejriwal said.

The video-call service would help patients get in touch with their family members.

To demonstrate how the video calling facility would help, Kejriwal went on to make video calls to a few patients and sought to know if they were satisfied with the treatment and services they were being given.

Sharing an image of his video interaction with an elderly woman, Kejriwal tweeted, “relatives of Corona patients admitted at Lok Nayak Hospital will now be able to speak to them”.

The need for a video calling facility was felt after many complained that they couldn’t talk to their critically ill relatives for days on end or get an update on their condition, a Delhi government spokesperson said.

The video calling facility will be offered with the help of 33 tablets, 31 of which have been placed in the Covid wards, and two at the help desk, Dr Suresh Kumar, the hospital’s medical director, said.

During an interaction with the chief minister, the hospital’s medical director Dr Suresh Kumar said deaths resulting from Covid-19 have reduced at the Lok Nayak hospital, ever since various modes of treatment such as plasma therapy and the steroid dexamethasone were introduced.

“The mortality rate recorded at the hospital fluctuates between 2.5% and 3.5% from week to week (since the hospital was turned into a Covid-19 facility). Although the data is yet to be analysed, we have seen a reduction in the number of deaths after various therapies were adopted by the hospital,” Kumar said.

Later, when asked by HT, the hospital said it was not at liberty to share the number of deaths reported from the hospital.

The hospital had administered plasma therapy to 29 Covid-19 patients during the phase 1 trial of the therapy in April, after it became the first government hospital in India to receive approval for the therapy.

The hospital received approval for phase 2 of the trial, with 200 patients, last week and nine patients have already been administered the therapy, which uses a blood component from people who have recovered from the infection that is rich in virus-fighting antibodies. This blood is administered to Covid-19 patients to boost their immunity. The government has created a plasma bank of 200 units at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences.

“The plasma therapy seems to help Covid-19 patients and fewer patients on this therapy go on to get severe symptoms as compared to a control group not receiving the therapy. We have also got a plasmapheresis machine at Lok Nayak and we are trying to persuade people who have recovered from the infection to donate plasma for use by others,”Kumar said.

Delhi’s health minister Satyendar Jain, who is recovering from the Covid-19, was also administered the therapy at a private hospital after a pneumonia patch in his lung started expanding.

Apart from plasma therapy, the hospital has also completed a pilot study of the drug Tocilizumab. It is a monoclonal antibody (a laboratory created molecule that mimics the antibodies needed to fight Covid-19).

Those with moderate symptoms are given the medicine on admission and the progression of the disease is evaluated against an equal number of control patients who did not receive the medicine, Kumar explained.

The hospital said the trial data would be released after it is duly published in a scientific journal.

The hospital will soon conduct trials on the antiviral drugs remdesivir and favipiravir, the medical director confirmed.

With Delhi reporting over 3,000 cases a day, the hospital has provided oxygen support on all 2,000 beds. The hospital has also increased its ICU beds to 100 and is working on further increasing it to 500, according to the medical director. Currently, 718 of the 2,000 beds and 56 of the 100 ventilator-facility beds at the hospital are occupied, according to the Delhi Corona App.