Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain on Wednesday said that by June 20, the government will arrange 15,000 COVID-19 beds, which are expected to be needed by June 30 in the city. By June 30, the government will prepare for July 15, when 33,000 beds are likely to be needed, he added.

“We will arrange for as many beds as possible as soon as we can. We are currently preparing ourselves for June 30, we will arrange 15,000 beds by June 20 and we want the preparations for July 15 to be completed by June 30,” he said.

The Minister also said that people will have to learn to live with the virus, and it is here to stay for the “next two-three years”.

Blames Centre

Mr. Jain noted that Delhi and Mumbai are two cities where people were brought in from other countries via flights.

“We warned the Centre against it but they did nothing to avoid the landing of flights in Delhi,” he said.

The Minister added that there is virus transmission in the community but reiterated that this can be declared by the Centre only and that community transmission is a technical term.

Contact tracing

“Earlier, in one case, contact tracing would be done for up to 600 people, and today, if we multiply 1,500 cases into 600, it gives us 9,00,000 people for contact tracing. So, contact tracing is being done only for immediate contacts and not for indirect contacts,” he said.

The Minister added that AIIMS director Randeep Guleria had said that there is community transmission in the containment zones.

“Since the base of the disease is such that around 30,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 right now, we are expecting that the rate of the virus will double in the next 10-15 days. This count is not absolute but depends on the rate of infection because one person may infect two or three more people before recovering fully from this disease, and this is true for every State and not just Delhi,” the Minister said.