With the national capital witnessing a fresh surge in cases of COVID-19, nearly 24,000 calls have been made by people to access Delhi government-run ambulance services during emergency situations in the last two weeks in the city, according to official data. Besides, the centralised Control Room set up by the Delhi government has received over 5,000 calls to seek coronavirus-related information.
On October 26, the city recorded 54 deaths pushing the toll to 6,312.The next day, 4,853 fresh cases and 44 fatalities were reported.
From October 28 onwards, the surge has been huge and over 5,000 daily cases were recorded per day from October 28-November 1.
Over 7,000 daily fresh cases have been recorded on two days in November (November 6 and November 8), over 6,000 daily cases four times, and more than 70 fatalities have been reported every day for the last three days, the highest in over four months.
In this two-week period, the number of calls made by people for accessing ambulance services of Centralised Accident and Trauma Services (CATS) through government helplines like 102, and the number of calls made to the COVID-19 Control Room have also jumped.
On November 8, the daily infection tally was 7745, the highest single-day spike here till date. The number of ambulance calls made on that day stood at 1857 and 337 calls were made to the control room.
According to a senior health official manning the Control Room based in Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) Delhi headquarters in Karkardooma in east Delhi, about "400 calls on an average are received per day by the Control Room".
As per the official data, 5,109 calls have been received at the Control Room in the last two weeks.
From October 26 to November 9, around 23,680 calls have been made by people to seek ambulance services, as per the data.
In this period, a staggering number of new cases -- over 86,000 -- have been reported.
The staff at the Control Room said a team of 15 people work in rotational six-hour shifts round-the-clock to address queries related to COVID-19.
"We tell them about precautions to be taken, measures to follow during home isolation and guide them to 102 helplines to call ambulances, as they can tell a driver the exact address. If routed through us, it becomes very tedious, so only in rare cases, we dispatch calls to CATS ambulance," a member of the staff at the Control Room told PTI.
"We are here 24x7 to provide all logistical support," the staff member said.
As the national capital reels under the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic here, the number of patients under home isolation in Delhi mounted to over 25,000 on Monday, a rise of 54 per cent in the last two weeks, while the containment zones count has expanded by over 32 per cent in the same period.
Delhi recorded more than 70 fatalities from COVID-19 for the third consecutive day on Monday, taking the death toll to 7060, while 5023 fresh cases pushed the infection tally in the national capital to over 4.4 lakh, according to a bulletin by the health department.
Seventy-one deaths were recorded in the city, it said.
The 5,023 fresh cases were detected following the 39,115 tests conducted on Sunday. The total number of cases climbed to 4,43,552, Monday's bulletin said.
The national capital's positivity rate stood at 12.84 per cent while the recovery rate was over 89 per cent. The death rate based on the last 10 days' average is 0.95 per cent while the cumulative case fatality rate is 1.59 per cent, the bulletin said.
On Sunday, Delhi had recorded 77 deaths and its highest single-day spike of 7,745 cases. On Saturday, 79 fatalities were recorded.
The National Centre for Disease Control in a report drafted recently had warned that Delhi needs to be prepared for about 15,000 fresh cases of COVID-19 per day, taking into account the upcoming winter season-related respiratory problems, a large influx of patients from outside and festive gatherings.
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