Covid-19: Health Ministry ask other departments to open up their hospitals

With hospital beds in short supply in almost every state, the Union Health Ministry has asked 13 other central departments like Defence, Labour, Coal, Steel, Railways, Power, Heavy Industries, Shipping and Atomic Energy to open up their hospitals to general Covid-19 patients by creating separate blocks as was done during the first wave.

In a letter to other central ministries and departments, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said hospitals under other central departments should open up exclusive Covid-19 blocks or hospitals both for in-patient and out-patient cases with a separate entry/exit point.

Other departments that Bhushan reached out to are Defence Production, Home, AYUSH, Power and Education. All of them have dedicated hospitals catering to their own workforce.

Last year when the epidemic was at its peak, such hospitals opened up their doors to general Covid-19 patients. But with the situation improving since last October, they were back to their original mandate.

With a huge second wave of the epidemic overwhelming the health infrastructure in most of the states, Bhushan asked the central departments to once again start dedicated Covid-19 services for the general population and communicate to the public and state governments on the availability of beds.

In the last 24 hours (data updated at 8 am), India reported more than 2.61 lakh new Covid-cases as the epidemic continues its unstoppable march. For four consecutive days, more than 200,000 new cases have been reported daily. For the first time, the death toll crossed the 1,500-mark on Sunday.

The national weekly positivity rate has increased from 3% to 13.54% in the last month. Chhattisgarh reported the highest weekly positivity rate among states at 30.38% while in Delhi, the positivity rate is just under 30%. The daily positivity rate for the country has doubled from 8% to 16.69% in the last 12 days.

“The lack of a resilient health delivery system is apparent as the cases loads are surging, India had over a year to be prepared and it is rather unfortunate that we have not used a data-driven decision-making process,” Oommen John, a senior public health researcher at The George Institute for Global Health, Delhi told DH.