BRACING FOR THE SURGE

With a national peak in Covid cases expected by mid-July, health experts emphasise the need to ramp up testing and contact-tracing in order to map the spread and keep the death rate low

- SONALI ACHARJEE

IT was in late March that Dr. N.N. Mathur, director of Lady Hardinge Medical College (LHMC), was informed that the hospital in central Delhi would serve as a COVID facility, but largely to supplement the testing and treatment capacity of the two major COVID hospitals in the National Capital Region— the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Jhajjar and Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital. It took Dr. Mathur’s team around two weeks to set up 60 beds and 17 ventilators for the new facility. “We didn’t initially anticipate more [patients than this] because of the lockdown,” he recalls. But, as on June 16, LHMC had treated twice that number of COVID patients, set up 100 more beds at the nearby YMCA premises, added 60 ‘COVID suspect’ beds, and plans to add 30 more treatment beds. In total, the same staff that once handled 60 beds is now managing 254 beds. Not a single COVID bed at the hospital is empty. “We prepared well but noticed a shift in mid-May. Suddenly, we had more severe cases, more asymptomatic cases. But the severe cases haven’t increased as much as the general COVID cases,” says Dr. Mathur. As COVID numbers continue to rise, many other hospitals around the country are adding to their bed strength. But that by itself will not be enough.

With 366,945 COVID infections, as on June 18, India is now the fourth worst-affected country in the world. However, despite the surge, the numbers in India are nowhere close to doubling as fast as they did in the US or Spain in the days ahead of their peak. “Had we not enforced a lockdown, we could have gone from a few cases in March to where we are now in a much shorter span of time. Our curve is upwards, but it is not a sharp ascent,” says Dr V.K. Paul, member of the NITI Aayog.