Madhurima
NEW DELHI: The coronavirus cases in India have continued to rise despite the country being under a nationwide lockdown for 70 days! Ever since the exemptions were announced regarding the lockdown, the cases have gone from 2 lakh to 2.5 lakh in merely 5 days! The total tally of the country is more than 2,50,000 and important metropolitan cities like Mumbai and Delhi have been affected the most.
Apart from this, the rapidly increasing cases have led to an acute shortage of resources and the health care infrastructure is struggling. Several reports from various cities speak about the fact that due to the shortage of beds and healthcare workers leads to the hospitals refusing to admit the patients who want to get treated for COVID-19 or simply get tests.
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Maharashtra is still the state with most coronavirus cases and has neared the 1,00,000-mark and has crossed the tally of China. It was the original epicentre when the cases began emerging in December and only has 84,186 patients.
The national capital, Delhi is all set to open it's borders from Monday but the government there has mentioned that the treatment of COVID-19 patients is restricted to only the residents of Delhi.
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Talking about the healthcare infrastructure, Dr Jugal Kishore, member of centre's rapid response team for coronavirus said, "Health infrastructure is creaking at this stage of the pandemic because of mismanagement, unprofessional planning, the greed of private institutions and unjustified fear. Health delivery in India is concentrated in urban and more in metro cities. Peripheral and primary care system was neglected. Majority of private hospitals in rural areas have either stopped giving services for COVID-19 patients or are extorting huge money. Therefore, patients are moving to bigger cities. ICUs with ventilator and available anaesthetics or pulmonary medicine professionals are not available at even district-level hospitals." He is also the head of the department of community medicine in the Safdarjung Hospital.
