As city races to add Covid beds, 600 critical patients on hospital wait list

Gurgaon: As many as 4,902 Covid patients have registered on the portal launched by the district administration to get hospital admission in the city.
The administration has deployed a team of doctors to scrutinise the applications and reach out to applicants to determine the actual number of people requiring hospitalisation. Officials said so far, they have reached out to 3,671 people, of whom 600 are critical and require institutional care but have been put on the waiting list because the Covid wards of all hospitals are full.
Officials said most of these patients had already started taking medication after tele-consultation with doctors and some of them were also assisted by doctors from the health department. A senior administration official said people on the waiting list will get a respite when more hospitals update their bed availability data on the portal.
“Around 100 more hospitals will be added to the list on the portal and after that happens, the hospitals will have to update their daily bed status and oxygen requirement. Our audit team will go and see whether they are using oxygen in a fair manner and whether they are reporting their vacancy properly or not. If a hospital has 10 beds vacant for five hours and doesn’t report on the portal, it is unfair. This is the idea of this portal,” said the official. As of 8pm on Friday, 11 oxygen beds were available at Sheetla hospital, five at Civil Hospital, four at Artemis hospital, 17 at Signature hospital, 14 at SGT Medical College and Research Institute and two at Sunrise hospital. There were five ICU beds available at Signature Hospital.
Deputy commissioner Dr Yash Garg said that temporary hospitals were being set up, which would enable more people to get hospital care within the next seven days. He said that around a 100-bed facility will be opened at Tau Devi Lal Stadium, which will be managed by Medanta, while another 100 beds were being prepared at a facility in Sector 27 by Hero Motocorp. He said that the IAF too was setting up a 150-bed facility. For families of patients who need immediate care, the last few weeks have been a nightmare.
Anita Sharma, a resident of Sector 4, said that all members of the household have tested positive for Covid-19. “We feel helpless. I lost my grandfather three weeks ago. No hospital bed was available. My father-in-law is admitted at a small private hospital. We are providing the oxygen. We tried multiple hospitals with ICU beds but nothing was available. Meanwhile, the hospital that has admitted him has given us no assurance on oxygen support. So, we are managing on our own.”