NEW DELHI: Positivity rate and daily count of Covid-19 cases in the national capital continues to decline. On Thursday, there were 3,231 fresh cases. Positivity rate dipped to 5.5 per cent.
According to the Delhi government’s daily health bulletin, 233 deaths took place in the last 24 hours. This takes the city’s Covid-19 death toll to 22,579. On Wednesday, Delhi had recorded 3,846 cases and 235 fatalities.
The daily tally started witnessing an alarming surge from the last week of March, which continued till the beginning of this month. Numbers spiked particularly sharply in the third week of April.
With numbers dipping over the last few days, the hospitalisation rate has also decreased. As per Thursday’s bulletin, 56 per cent of beds were vacant in hospitals across the city.
There were 5,685 beds in Covid care centres and 515 in Covid health centres. At 9 pm on Thursday, there were 352 ICU beds with ventilators and 1,638 without ventilators.
The number of oxygen beds available in the city was 12,824. About 10 days ago, there was severe shortage of oxygen in city hospitals. As the pressure mounted on the medical infrastructure in Delhi, several patients died in the absence of medical care and oxygen.
But with the situation showing signs of consistent improvement, the gap between the number of hospitalisation cases and discharge from the hospitals is also widening. On Wednesday, 731 patients were hospitalised, while 1,090 were discharged. New admissions and patients being discharged were roughly equal in the first week of April.
However, the number of hospitalisations started shooting up in the second week, which led to a severe crisis of nonavailability of beds. On May 2, just two ICU beds were vacant. At one time in April, discharge rate was merely 25% of admissions.
On May 14, 1,256 patients were admitted while 1,331 were discharged. The next day, new admissions reduced further to 1,052 and 1,379 patients were allowed to leave after recovery. On Sunday, the number of new admissions dipped further to 952 and the number of discharged patients was 1,079.
