Over 150 beds for isolation patients and around 550 ventilators will be available across private health facilities in and around Calcutta for Covid-19 patients, health department officials said on Friday.

While a few of the private hospitals have started admitting patients testing positive for the disease, some others will do so from next week, the officials said.

The state government will refer patients to the private hospitals but they can also admit patients on their own.

“We have a dedicated elevator for Covid-19 patients. The elevator is programmed in a way that it would stop only at the floor where an isolation ward for such patients has been set up. In the emergency room, such patients will be kept separated from others,” said Alok Roy, chairman, Medica Group of Hospitals.

At the RN Tagore International Institute for Cardiac Sciences, the isolation ward for patients testing positive for the coronavirus has been set up on the ground floor.

“We have a 5-bed triaging and isolation ward for suspected patients . The unit has dedicated ventilators and monitors and all necessary protective equipment,” said R. Venkatesh, regional director, east, Narayana Health, of which RN Tagore hospital is the flagship unit.

On March 19, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had appealed to private hospitals to join the Covid-19 fight by creating isolation beds and, if possible, lend doctors during emergency. She had met representatives of several hospitals at a meeting in Nabanna, which was also attended by officials of the health and other departments.

“During our interaction with the chief minister, we had promised to allocate beds for treatment of coronavirus patients,” said Rupak Barua, the chief executive officer of the AMRI group of hospitals.

From Saturday, AMRI Salt Lake would throw open nine floors of its annex, with 52 beds, for critically ill Covid-19 patients. Health department officials discussed the modalities of admission with AMRI officials on Friday.

Pradip Tondon, the CEO of Belle Vue Clinic, said: “We have scattered the isolation beds across different floors where extreme care has been taken to ensure there is complete dissociation of other patients and doctors with those admitted here.”

Representatives of at least 26 private hospitals have told the health department that they were ready with ventilators and other gadgets to treat coronavirus patients, in accordance with an advisory issued by the state government. The advisory has laid down how an isolation ward should be ready with electrical points to install ventilators and other gadgets.