With No Beds Available, Covid Patients Being Turned Away From Hospitals In Bengaluru

One of India’s biggest COVID-19 care centres opened in Bangalore last week even as the city entered its second lockdown. Cases have been spiraling in the tech capital since mid-June and, with government facilities at full capacity, there’s been a scramble to marshal private hospital beds. The previous weekend, three-fourths of the city’s 1,041 Covid-dedicated hospital beds and 1,799 Covid-care centre beds were occupied. Amidst this, there were accounts of patients being turned away from hospitals because beds weren’t available.

Climbing from far down the Covid ranking of states, Karnataka is now placed at number five—the state’s case numbers are heavily skewed by Bangalore city whose daily tally was hovering around 1,500 at the start of the week. The city’s early gains, especially in efficient contact-tracing, have now been stretched thin because of the rising caseload.

Covid care centres are for asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases—these are meant to relieve the pressure on hospitals. The new facility in Bangalore was a convention centre that has been re-purposed to accommodate 10,100 patients. To man these centres, the Karnataka health department says it will need over 2,000 doctors and 4,000 nurses in Bangalore alone—walk-in interviews for temporary posts were held.

Elsewhere as well, authorities are battling the surge in the same way—Delhi too has a similar-sized care centre at Chhattarpur. Another temporary centre in the national capital—the 1,000-bed Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Covid Hospital opened with 250 ICU beds.

Across the country’s big cities, reports suggest an urgent requirement for ICU beds to treat Covid patients. Currently, here’s how the figures stack up, according to the Union health ministry, there are 39,820 ICU beds and 1,42,415 oxygen-supported beds along with 20,047 ventilators in the country.

How effective these Covid-care centres will be depends on an efficiently-managed triage—the term refers to deciding what level of care a patient requires. “When you don’t know what’s going to happen, you want to go to the place where you feel most secure even if it is costly. That is why people are actually rushing to private hospitals or well-equipped public hospitals,” points out Prof Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. The insecurity, he says, also stems from the fear about the need for advanced care. “If they (Covid-care centres) are well-managed, oxygen-supplied and adequately staffed, that should not be a problem. It depends entirely on the confidence in the health system.”

Ajay Sukumaran in Bangalore