Less than 7 per cent of India's patients with the new coronavirus disease need hospital care, the Union health ministry said on Wednesday, recording a fresh unprecedented spike of 5,611 new cases.
The new patients have raised the country's total confirmed cases to 106,750 of whom 61,149 are under observation or treatment in hospitals, 42,298 have recovered and 3,303 have died.
Among the 61,149 patients currently under observation or treatment in hospitals, 1,798 (2.9 per cent) patients are on oxygen support, 1,834 (3 per cent) are under intensive care unit support and 275 (0.45 per cent) on ventilator support, the health ministry said.
'This data is very important,' said Lav Agarwal, joint secretary in the health ministry. 'It tells us that through a focus on early identification and a focus on surveillance, we're able to identify cases in time and prevent cases |from converting into serious cases.'
'Only 6.39 per cent of the active cases need hospital management,' Agarwal said. 'This has another implication - we have over the past two months upgraded our hospital infrastructure with additional supported beds, ICU beds and ventilators.'
Even if fresh cases emerge in the coming weeks, Agarwal said, this upgraded hospital infrastructure will be able to manage cases, given that nearly 40 per cent of patients have already recovered and a vast majority of other patients are also non-serious and on way to recovery.
The health ministry had in an update said last week that the Centre and the states had established 916 dedicated Covid-19 hospitals and 2,044 Covid-19 care centres that collectively have 280,000 isolation beds, nearly 30,000 ICU beds and 18,855 ventilators for patients with serious disease.
Whether this number is sufficient would depend on how fast the infection grows and the size of the peak infection, critical care medicine specialists have said.
The number of active cases - patients under observation or treatment in hospitals - has increased from around 36,000 to 61,000 over the past two weeks. The steady increase in the number of active patients suggests that more enter hospitals each day than recover and exit.
Doctors point out that the vast majority of Covid-19 patients in hospitals are there for isolation and not because they need special hospital care.
The health ministry had on April 28 released guidelines for the home isolation of Covid-19 patients who have mild or no symptoms. The ministry has not said how many patients since then, if any, have been placed under home isolation.
The patients' recovery rate, Agarwal said in a presentation to the media, has increased from 7.1 per cent on March 25, 11 per cent on April 14, 26 per cent on May 4 to 39.6 per cent on May 20.
'This is a reminder that the disease is curable and the clinical management protocols adopted by India are effective,' the ministry said in a media release.
But doctors and public health experts point out that given India's case fatality rate of around 3 per cent, 97 per cent patients should be expected to recover.