India may use railway carriages for virus patient beds

15/06/2020

This news has been read 13138 times!

NEW DELHI – India’s home minister has offered 500 railway carriages for use as makeshift coronavirus hospital wards as the capital New Delhi struggles to contain a spike in cases.

Izhaar Hussain Shaikh, center, an ambulance driver who works for HelpNow, an initiative to help the stretched services of first responders, walks in a lane outside their house in a slum as he arrives for a late lunch in Mumbai, India May 29, 2020. It’s an exhausting job and Shaikh’s daily shifts are grueling, sometimes even stretching to 16 hours. For a city that has a history of shortage of ambulances and where coronavirus pandemic has claimed hundreds of lives, putting the health care system under immense strain, every help counts. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

Amit Shah, India’s second-most powerful politician after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was set to convene a meeting Monday with all major political parties represented on the deteriorating situation in the capital.
Delhi has about 9,000 beds dedicated to COVID-19 patients among public and private hospitals, but a state government panel of experts has said that Delhi will need at least 15,000 beds by the end of June.

India’s health ministry reported a jump of more than 11,000 new coronavirus infections nationwide for a third consecutive day, taking the total caseload to more than 332,000, including 9,520 deaths.
India is the fourth hardest-hit country by the pandemic in the world after the U.S., Russia and Brazil.

This news has been read 13138 times!

15/06/2020