Reconvert some COVID beds to non-COVID: Pvt hospitals

New Delhi: With the incidence of coronavirus in the city appearing to show a declining trend and many beds empty, several private hospitals are citing mounting losses to urge the Delhi government to reconvert some COVID-19 facilities and allow more non-COVID services.

According to the Delhi Corona app, only 2,783 beds of the 15,438 dedicated beds for coronavirus patients across private and government hospitals in the Capital are occupied.

Many hospitals said more than half their dedicated COVID-19 beds are vacant as a majority of COVID-19 patients are in home isolation. At the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, which has 650 beds for Coronavirus patients, 551 are unoccupied. At the Batra and Venkateshwar hospitals, which have 502 and 439 beds, 465 and 397 beds are vacant respectively.

Similarly, the Shalimar Bagh and Saket branches of Max Hospital have 350 and 216 beds, of which 220 and 162 beds are unoccupied.

A spokesperson of Fortis Healthcare, which operates in the Delhi-NCR region, said other surgeries and treatments, barring very critical ones, have largely been put on hold and the occupancy of non-COVID beds is on the lower side.

It is important that hospitals function at the optimum capacity now and we request the Delhi government to allow elective surgeries and non-COVID services to resume at all hospitals, the spokesperson said. According to K K Sethi, chairperson of the Delhi Heart and Lung Institute (DHLI), patients with other problems are not coming due to the fear of contracting the virus. "We are a speciality hospital and patients are not coming for angioplasty or specific treatments because of the stigma," Sethi said.

This is leading to losses and operational costs have also shot up considerably, he said. We are just borrowing from the bank and it's (loan) coming to crores of rupees now," he said.