Kejriwal Delinks Hotels Attached to Hospitals After Drop in Cases

With coronavirus cases dipping in the national capital, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday ordered the delinking of hotels attached with hospitals.

(Photo: PTI)

With coronavirus cases dipping in the national capital, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday ordered the delinking of hotels attached with hospitals. India’s tally on Wednesday crossed 15 lakh with 48,513 new cases reported on 27 July. Several hotels have been associated with hospitals to increase bed capacity for coronavirus patients, but now many are lying vacant. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal will hold a meeting with senior administrative and health officials regarding this move on Wednesday.

The hotels have set aside around 600 beds for patients.

Delhi has a little less than 11,000 active cases of COVID-19 and Delhi has 42% more beds than in June, as per data on Sunday.

The government has assured that they are equipped to handle any influx of cases in the future.

The city currently has 15,451 beds earmarked for COVID-19 in government, private and makeshift field hospitals. Of these, 2,095 beds are intensive care units, which had a 36% occupancy as on Monday evening, according to the Delhi Corona App.

Meanwhile, Delhi’s first round of sero-surveillance, for which around 22,000 samples were collected between 27 June and 5 July, found that almost 23% of the city’s residents had antibodies. While the number of deaths has dropped significantly, the district administration has insisted that they will be steadily increasing the testing rate to stop the spread of the virus.

“Existing guidelines say that if any patient’s antigen test is negative but has symptoms, RT-PCR test must be done on him. I directed the officers today to ensure strict compliance of these guidelines,” Kejriwal had tweeted.