Assess every Covid death, Union health min tells Delhi govt

NEWDELHI: The Union health ministry has advised the Delhi government to carry out an assessment of every person to die of Covid-19 in the city to check how many days before their death they had been brought to the hospital and from where.

This assessment has to focus on whether the person was in home isolation and whether the patient was admitted to a hospital at the right time, according to the health ministry.

This comes days after a U-turn by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) on allowing home isolation in Delhi.

The authority had initially mandated a five-day institutional isolation, then said all Covid-19 patients – including asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms – would have to visit the Covid Care Centre for an assessment.

The decision to discontinue home isolation was taken to prevent deaths that took place when people reached hospitals late.

With Delhi reporting over 3,000 cases of the viral infection every day, the centre has stepped in to provide support for infrastructure, testing and consumables.

A 1,000-bed field hospital has been created in Dhaula Kuan, which will start working from next week. The hospital has been constructed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation and manned by Army doctors and paramedics. The hospital will have oxygen, ICU and ventilator beds as well as a referral relationship with AIIMS, New Delhi.

Around 2,000 of the 10,000 beds in the Sardar Patel Covid Care Centre set up at Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Chhatarpur, have been operationalised with the support of medical teams from the Central Armed Police Forces and the Indo-tibetan Border Police.

The central government has also provided 425 ventilators for Delhi government-run hospitals. Over 1,100,000 N-95 masks, almost 700,000 PPE kits, and 4,480,000 HCQ tablets (used by health care and front line workers, and the caregivers of patients to prevent the infection).

To ramp up testing in the city, the Union health ministry, through the Indian Council of Medical Research, also approved a rapid antigen test and provided 50,000 kits to the Delhi government. The Delhi government has placed orders for another 6 lakh kits. The central government has also provided 470,000 RT-PCR tests to 12 laboratories in Delhi, along with viral transport medium and extraction kits needed to do the test, according to a release by the Union health ministry.