The AAP government has ordered de-linking of hotels which were earlier attached to different hospitals to combat the Coronavirus pandemic in Delhi.
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has taken the decision in view of a major improvement in the Coronavirus situation in the national capital.
According to the government, the situation in Delhi is currently improving and all hotel beds are lying vacant and therefore, it has decided to release these hotels from COVID care.
Informing about the same, Kejriwal tweeted: “Some hotels were attached to the hospitals to increase the number of COVID beds. In view of the improving situation and all the hotel beds lying vacant for last many days, these hotels are now being released.”
More than 4,600 additional COVID-19 beds were created in Delhi by attaching around 40 hotels to various hospitals. But most of these beds were lying vacant due to improving COVID-19 situation in Delhi.
In June, as the number of Coronavirus cases hit dangerous levels in the national capital crossing the 36,000-mark, the Delhi government had directed four premier hotels — Pullman, Hyatt Regency, Vasant Continental and Andaz Delhi in south Delhi — to be attached with hospitals to accommodate more patients.
Prior to this, Hotel Crown Plaza, Okhla was attached with Batra Hospital; Hotel Surya, New Friends Colony with Indraprastha Apollo Hospital; Hotel Siddharth, Rajendra Place with Dr B L Kapur Memorial Hospital; Hotel Jivitesh, Pusa Road with Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and Hotel Sheraton, Saket with Max Smart Super Speciality Hospital.
This was done to accommodate more number of Coronavirus patients.
Non-compliance of order would have attracted penal provisions under the Disaster Management Act, 2006, the Delhi government has stipulated.
Meanwhile, in another tweet, Kejriwal on Wednesday also informed that as per the existing guidelines, if any patient’s antigen test is negative but has symptoms, RT-PCR test must be conducted. He also directed officers to ensure strict compliance of these guidelines.
Delhi has reported over 1.32 lakh cases so far, out of which 10,887 are currently active and 1.17 lakh people have recovered.
On June 23, the city witnessed the highest single-day spike of 3,947 cases, but the numbers have come down steadily since then despite an increase in testing.
The first Coronavirus case in Delhi was reported on March 2 and then the situation worsened and the capital became the hotbed of COVID-19 infection in during April, May, June. Till May, all the nine districts of the national capital – South, South West, Shahdara, South East, West, North, Central, East and New Delhi were marked as ‘Red Zones’.
On July 20, Delhi’s daily case count dropped under 1000 for the first time since June 1.
Earlier on Monday, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had tweeted that Delhi has reached the tenth position in terms of nunber of active cases but warned against complacency.
The AAP government chose a joint approach to fight the Coronavirus pandemic by inviting the Centre as well as the opposition BJP and the Congress for their valuable contributions.
Late June, raking up his slogan of “Corona harega aur Delhi jeetega”, Kejriwal had asserted that his government has adopted ‘five weapons’ to fight the virus – ramping up bed capacity; testing and isolation, survey and screening, providing oximeter and oxygen concentrator and finally treatment with plasma therapy.