A crisis of Covid beds is already being felt in hospitals in the city and adding to the problem is the alleged failure of the state health department to post on its website updated information on availability of such beds.

The absence of latest data on Covid beds has triggered fears of a rerun of last year when families of patients had to run from one hospital to another in search of a bed.

The state health department had last year started posting on its website daily updated information on availability of Covid beds for the benefit of patients and their families. But a look at the website on Sunday showed the data had not been updated for a while.

The number of Covid beds at several private hospitals, as told by their officials, did not match the data on the health department’s website.

A hospital in south-east Calcutta had 40 Covid beds on Sunday. Only two were vacant. But the health department’s website stated the hospital had 129 Covid beds, of which 95 were vacant. An official of the hospital said the numbers were from last year.

The number of Covid beds in a central Calcutta hospital was more than what was mentioned on the website on Sunday. The website stated that the figures were current as of April 9, a claim denied by hospital officials.

Officials of several private hospitals in the city said the department had not been collecting data on Covid bed availability from them for a long time.

Ajay Chakraborty, the state’s director of health services, told Metro on Sunday that the department would start updating the status daily from next week. “We are working on it. We are expecting to update the data daily from next week,” Chakraborty said.

But the crisis of Covid beds has started to be felt, following a steep rise since last month in the number of people testing positive for the disease.

A teacher at a north Calcutta school said a friend’s brother was taken to several hospitals but was denied admission because of unavailability of Covid beds. He was finally admitted to a south Calcutta hospital.

An official of Belle Vue Clinic said the hospital was receiving calls from multiple people seeking admission for their known ones but all their Covid beds were occupied.

“We have 116 beds and all are occupied. Twenty of the beds are in the critical care unit. We will add 20 more critical care beds in a week,” said Pradip Tondon, the chief executive officer of Belle Vue Clinic.

At the RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences, 74 of the 82 Covid beds were occupied on Sunday. The hospital has 25 critical care beds, four of which were vacant on Sunday.

“We had 21 patients last Sunday and today we have 74 patients,” said R. Venkatesh, regional head, east, Narayana Health, which owns the hospital.

AMRI Hospitals had only one Covid bed vacant at its three units. “One general bed in the Dhakuria unit was vacant on Sunday afternoon,” said an official of the group.

The Dhakuria hospital has 86 Covid beds, 24 of which are critical care beds. The Mukundapur unit of the group has 33 Covid beds, 17 of which are critical care beds, while all 24 Covid beds in the Salt Lake unit are critical care beds.

Even when the health department’s website was updating the vacant bed status daily last year, there were allegations that the numbers were not accurate.

Many hospitals had then said the numbers were not being updated real time. Which means if a hospital had some vacant beds in the morning – when the status was uploaded in the website – these were filled by afternoon or evening on many days.