Delhi’s daily infections of 6,000 or more are a matter of concern but it’s the rising number of deaths that’s more worrying. The ratio of deaths in the Capital has increased from 10 per thousand on October 8 to 14 per thousand on November 8. It recorded 401 deaths for the week ending November 8, marking an increase of 40% over the previous week. That’s the highest tally since July.
At one point Delhi accounted for just 3.6% of the country’s daily deaths but that has now jumped to 14%. In terms of cases, Delhi’s share has gone up from 3.7% to 15.2% during this period.
Hospitals are filling up too. On Sunday, 1,017 of the 1,257 or 81% of Delhi’s ventilators and 82% of ICU beds were occupied.
While the Centre is asking private hospitals to reserve 80% capacity for Covid patients, the dashboard shows there’s not too much non-Covid ICU capacity to spare. The occupancy rate in the case of non-Covid ICU beds was 77%.
An FE analysis had shown that the requirement for ventilators had started increasing even before Delhi witnessed a spurt in infections. On September 14, 2.6% of active cases in the city were on ventilators, and another 2.7% were in the ICU. But on October 31, this proportion had increased, as Delhi recorded 2.7% people on ventilators and 4.3% in ICUs. On November 8, the number of ICU admissions had further increased to 4.4%.
Active infections need to increase to 54,350 for Delhi to run out of ICUs. On Sunday, Delhi had 40,258 active cases.
