Delhi coronavirus cases set to explode, hospitals running out of beds

FILE PHOTO: People wearing masks walk with shopping bags inside a mall as India eases lockdown restrictions that were imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in New Delhi, India - Reuters

New Delhi (Reuters): Delhi’s infections of coronavirus will climb to more than half a million by the end of July and it does not have the hospital capacity to handle such an outbreak, the city state’s deputy chief minister said on Tuesday.

The warning came as harrowing accounts of people struggling to get a hospital bed in the Indian capital emerged, including some who said their loved ones died on the doorsteps of medical centres which refused to take them in.

Despite a vast lockdown of its 1.3 billion people imposed in March, the disease is spreading in India at one of the world’s fastest rates as it re-opens a battered economy.

The caseload stood at 266,598, the world’s fifth largest and set to overtake the United Kingdom in the next few days.

Delhi, one of the hotspots, has nearly 29,000 cases that will grow to 550,000 by the end of July, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia told reporters. By then it will need 80,000 beds compared with its current capacity of nearly 9,000.

 “For Delhi this is a big problem, if cases continue to rise,” he said. Mumbai is the other hotspot.

Already the crisis is putting pressure on the health system. Aniket Goyal, a Delhi university student, said his grandfather was refused admission in six government-run hospitals last week because they said they had no beds even though a government app showed that beds were available.

When he went to the city’s private health care facilities, they found the daily cost of treatment so high, they withdrew. The family filed a public interest petition in court seeking its intervention. The court set a hearing for the following week by which time the 78-year-old man had died.

A Delhi government coronavirus mobile app showed the city of more than 20 million people had 8,814 COVID-19 beds, with more than half occupied. Of the 96 hospitals listed, 20 had no beds available, the app showed on Tuesday.

The app also tracks the availability of ventilators, and data showed that only 260 of the 519 ventilators were in use.

 “Delhi’s health system is broken,” said Congress MP Manish Tewari.