The sharp rise in the number of COVID-19 cases in the national capital can be called the "third wave", said Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain on Wednesday.
The Minister, however, said it can be attributed to the aggressive contact tracing being done in the past 15 days as well.
"About 6,800 beds are occupied in Delhi due to COVID-19 while 9,000 are available. We can call this the third wave of COVID cases here but we have focused on aggressive testing in the last 15 days so the spike can be attributed to that too," Jain said.
He further said the Delhi government will approach the Supreme Court over the Delhi HC's overturn of their decision on reserving ICU beds in private hospitals.
"We're going to the Supreme Court to address the High Court overturn of our mandate to reserve 80% beds as ICU beds in private hospitals because the main issue is that of the availability of ICU beds," he said.
He further said there is high occupancy in private hospitals as people coming from outside Delhi go to these hospitals for treatment.
Jain, however, reassured that the treatment protocols in both government and private hospitals are same.
However, the availability of Covid ICU beds with ventilators at 39 private and a Central government-run hospital in the national capital has gone nil amid the massive surge in the novel coronavirus cases in the last few days, according to official data.
This reflects in the 100% occupancy of ICU beds with ventilators in Delhi's biggest and most prestigious private hospitals. Meanwhile, very few are available in the national capital's government hospitals.
Central government-run Northern Railway Hospital and leading private hospitals such as Max, Indraprastha Apollo and Fortis hospitals showed full occupancy of the ICU beds with ventilators available for the Covid patients.
The figure stands around over 40% of the total hospitals where such a facility is currently provided. As of now, 96 hospitals, including government and private-run, cater this facility in Delhi.
The data showed that most of the top private hospitals in Delhi had been fully occupied while government-run (central and Delhi) are running extremely low on the vacancy of ventilators beds in their ICU wards dedicated to Covid patients.
The online Corona Dashboard of the Delhi government showed that till Wednesday 5 am, out of 1,244 ICU beds with a ventilator facility (Covid), only 401 were vacant.
Medical experts claimed that the concoction of non-adherence to follow Covid appropriate behaviour among people amid festivities, compounded by winter and the issue of air pollution, is pushing the caseload of the national capital to another peak.
As per the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) today, Delhi has 36,375 active coronavirus cases, while 3,60,069 patients have been cured so far. The disease has taken the lives of 6,652 persons till date.
The national capital on Tuesday reported the highest single-day spike of 6,725 Covid-19 cases, bringing the total tally to 4,03,096.
(With agency inputs)
