New Delhi: A major outcome of the high-level meeting between Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Home Minister Amit Shah and other senior government officials was to repurpose the way healthcare infrastructure is allocated for the pandemic in Delhi and ensuring that enough beds, doctors, medicines and other ancillary materials are available for patients.
Among the key decisions, both the Centre and the Delhi government agreed that the former would add more than 300 ICU beds at the Dhaula Kuan DRDO COVID-19 facility, where there are already 250 beds. In addition, it was decided to dedicate certain hospitals run by the municipal corporations of Delhi to COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms to free up other hospitals for serious cases, Shah said in a tweet after the meeting.
The home minister said to increase the number of oxygen beds, the 10,000-bedded Chhatarpur COVID care centre will be strengthened and that the Health Ministry had been directed to make arrangements for requisite numbers of BIPAP machines and high flow nasal canulas to the Delhi government within the next two days.
It was presented in the meeting that the number of active cases per day has increased substantially but the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) continues to remain in control. The health and medical infrastructure, such as dedicated Covid-19 beds, beds with ventilators, and ICUs, is already showing signs of strain, the statement said.
Dedicated multi-departmental teams will visit all the private hospitals in Delhi to physically check the availability of Covid-19 medical infrastructure vis-a-vis the admission status. Doctors and paramedics of paramilitary forces will be flown in to be deployed in the national capital to deal with the shortage of manpower, the MHA said.
Moreover, Shah also announced that they had decided to double the number of RT-PCR tests being conducted every day in the coming days. This in line with CM Kejriwal's announcement that daily tests would be increased to over 1 lakh in the next few weeks.
The MHA said mobile testing laboratories will be deployed by the health ministry and ICMR in areas where poor and vulnerable sections of the society reside, the statement said. Currently, around 18,000 to 19,000 RT-PCR tests are conducted daily in Delhi. The government also decided to temporarily shift some testing laboratories from other parts of the country, where they are unutilised, to Delhi. House-to-house survey in the entire Delhi will be conducted by the teams of AIIMS, Delhi government and municipal corporations of Delhi and all the symptomatic persons found in the survey would be tested and provided the necessary treatment.
Shah said that the situation of COVID-19 in Delhi, as also in the neighbouring areas of the National Capital Region (NCR), would be reviewed on a continuous basis over the coming weeks. The national Capital had recorded its highest single-day spike of 8,593 COVID-19 cases on Wednesday. On Thursday, 104 fatalities, the highest in a day in over five months, were recorded.