RAJASTHAN
On April 18, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot held a Covid review meeting where doctors, bureaucrats and some ministers recommended a total lockdown. By midnight, Gehlot had ordered a partial lockdown in Rajasthan. The second wave of Covid, though not as widespread as in the neighbouring states, has battered Rajasthan’s health infrastructure and forced the Gehlot government to turn more and more hospitals into designated Covid centres and reserve 25 per cent of the beds in private hospitals for Covid patients.
In March, Rajasthan had recorded 31 Covid deaths. On April 20 alone, 64 people died, taking the fatalities in the current month to 450. It is feared that the total number of active cases may jump from 76,000 on April 19 to 130,000 by the month-end. On April 20, the state reported 12,201 new cases. The recovery rate has fallen to 81 per cent from 98 per cent in March. Jaipur district reported 2,011 cases on April 20 (its highest ever), Jodhpur 1,641 and Kota 1,307.
The state has a daily testing capacity of 77,000, which is being scaled up to 100,000. The RT-PCR test fee for private labs has been capped at Rs 350. Over 60 per cent of the active cases are under 45 years of age, with a fourth of those testing positive in April belonging in the 21-30 age group. At the Rajasthan University of Health Sciences (RUHS), a dedicated Covid hospital in Jaipur, all 1,200 beds were occupied on April 19 against an average 30 in March. Some 150 beds laid out in the hospital’s corridors also had patients.
The state claims to have 3,000 ventilators, but only two-thirds are functional. Last year, Rajasthan had reserved 22,000 beds for Covid, but a grave crisis is imminent given the pace at which cases are rising. On April 17, 7,000 Covid patients took admission in hospitals across the state. The government is offering plasma therapy at 12 places and is in the process buying 1,500 oxygen concentrators. A supply shortage has meant some hospitals are providing patients half-filled oxygen cylinders.