The health department has started posting a list of vacant Covid-19 beds in private hospitals on its website from Friday.

The figure is not real-time but based on information sent by hospitals in the morning, officials said.

At 9.30pm on Friday, 10 out of 22 private hospitals in Calcutta and North 24-Parganas showed no beds for Covid-19 patients.

An official of a private hospital said health department officials had asked them to send the information on available Covid-19 beds by 10am or 10.30am every day.

“To upload data real-time, the servers of the hospitals must be linked to the health department’s server,” said the official.

At a meeting with private hospitals on Thursday, chief secretary Rajiva Sinha had said some hospitals were refusing to admit patients testing positive for Covid-19 on the ground that no beds were available.

The meeting decided that even those private hospitals that are not designated as Covid treatment centres would have to send the bed data to the health department.

An official of a south Calcutta hospital said five Covid patients were discharged and as many admitted on Friday.