Bureaucratic barriers leave Covid-19 patients begging for beds

Saurabh Sharma As Sushil Kumar Srivastava’s breathlessness worsened, his family bundled the 70-year-old into a car and drove him to a hospital in the capital of India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state, where he tested positive for the coronavirus. After the private hospital turned the retired government official away because it didn’t have any vacant beds, his son Ashish brought two oxygen cylinders and drove his father on a hunt for a hospital that could admit him. “All the hospitals asked for a referral letter from the chief medical officer’s (CMO) office’’, Ashish said, referring to the top healthcare official of the city of some 3.5 million people. At the office, Ashish said nobody helped him. “I was shooed away by the police’’, he said, when he tried to meet the CMO. Three days later, Ashish said someone from the government called him offering a bed for his father — a day after Srivastava had passed away at a private clinic. The family’s ordeal reflects the worsening Covid-19 crisis in Uttar Pradesh, where people are battling bureaucracy along with the disease. To get a Covid-19 bed in Lucknow, families say they need to show the result of an RT-PCR test, which are already in short supply. Next, patients are required to register with the CMO’s office, which then forwards the request to the Integrated Command Control Centre for Covid management that makes the final bed allocation, a government official said. A state government spokesman on Wednesday said that authorities were planning to end the CMO referral system this week, and instead appoint officials at every Covid-19 hospital to assess whether a patient needed to be admitted. The cumbersome process has come under criticism, including from the state’s Human Rights Commission that has asked the government to ditch the referral rule. “There are expert doctors in hospitals who can decide if the patient needs to be admitted or not’’, the commission said on Tuesday. “This referral letter system is not required.” Having already become the country currently being hit hardest by the pandemic, India has recorded more than 200,000 new Covid-19 cases daily for the last seven days, marking the world’s steepest rise this month, and there is no sign yet that the second wave of infections is going to peak soon. In Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people, infections are rising by more than 22,000 cases daily, severely straining its creaky healthcare system. — Reuters