Delhi’s health care crumbles under corona surge, AIIMS calls it chaos

By Ashish Srivastava New Delhi, Nov 6 : With the return of the dreaded pollution season, social distancing norms going for a toss and coinciding with winter, the national capital is staring at a coronavirus disaster. Since the last two weeks, Delhi has been logging over 4,000 COVID cases daily.
Two days ago, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced the situation as the third wave of the infection. On Thursday, the Delhi high Court criticised the Aam Aadmi Party led government over its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak and stated that Delhi was on its way to become the “corona capital of the country”.
The latest upsurge has brought about a collapse of healthcare facilities in the national capital. For over a week, the ICU ventilator beds across 96 hospitals in Delhi designated for the treatment of COVID-19 are in short supply. Patients are running from pillar to post just to occupy a single bed.
The situation is equally bad at India’s premier medical institute, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) which is reeling under pressure from COVID and non-COVID cases alike. Doctors at the hospital described the situation to IANS as complete chaos. “Just look at the queue formed outside,” pointed out Dr Roshan Mathew, in-shift Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of the emergency ward, to this correspondent.
“We are already short staffed where half our staff is catering to COVID patients, while the remaining are divided in serving OPDs/IPDs, emergency wards or serving their isolation/quarantine period. The current spike is breaking our back. The patients are queueing outside the wards and we are striving hard to provide medical care to each one,” Mathew said.
Apart from the current spike in cases, Mathew stated that another reason for the huge influx of patients coming to the hospitals was the conversion of two top-tertiary care hospitals in Delhi to dedicated COVID facilities. This has diverted patients from the two hospitals — Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital (LNJP) and Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital (GTB) — to AIIMS, raising its occupancy by 10% at least.