At the Suryaa, a luxury hotel in New Delhi, the staff prepare, dumbfounded, to swap their suits and sarees dressed for the pin for full suits adapted to the new clientele of the establishment: patients of the coronavirus.
The Covid-19 epidemic is still raging in India, which today has half a million official cases, and is progressing rapidly. With more than 73,000 sick and 2,400 dead declared, the capital New Delhi is now the most affected city of the giant in South Asia, ahead of Bombay.
Faced with the influx of patients, the city of 20 million inhabitants ordered the unprecedented requisition of hotels, reception halls and train cars to convert them into isolation centers for the sick, in order to relieve hospitals already overloaded.
For the employees of the requisitioned places, this is a professional turn to say the least …
“We received training from the hospital on how to wear and remove personal protective equipment. This is something I never thought I would have to do in my career in the hotels, “says Ritu Yadav, a manager at the Suryaa hotel, where the first patients will arrive shortly.
“For doctors and nurses, this is part of their lives. For us, it is a completely new experience, and very trying.”
More used to changing sheets and doing room service than caring for pandemic patients, the Suryaa teams had to improvise to adapt to the new situation.
Two hundred beds in the rooms are preparing to receive asymptomatic patients or those presenting only moderate symptoms of the new coronavirus. The hotel cannot charge them more than 60 euros per day, including meals.
Food will be brought on disposable paper plates. Red lines have been drawn to implement physical distancing, and contact between staff and patients will be limited to what is necessary.
– Cardboard beds –
The epidemic wave has hit New Delhi hard. Local newspapers are full of stories of patients who died after seeing multiple hospitals refuse them admission due to a lack of beds.
In early June, the megalopolis government announced that it expects more than half a million cases of Covid-19 in late July for the capital alone, an increase of almost twenty in two months.
According to official estimates, the outbreak would require 80,000 hospital beds. Delhi has only 13,000 in normal times, adding those of the public and private.
To develop their capacity to receive patients, the authorities notably requisitioned around thirty hotels. Each establishment is attached to a referral hospital, which can dispatch caregivers in case of emergency.
A huge religious center is also being reconverted into an isolation hall with a capacity of 10,000 beds, many made from cardboard boxes.
The requisition has outraged certain hotels, which are already facing heavy financial losses due to the two months of confinement in India and the numerous travel restrictions that persist.
x “It was a shock for us because nobody told us about it, we discovered it through the press”, tells AFP c.
Hotel owners, including those from Suryaa, have taken legal action. They argued that many of their employees are over 50 and therefore at risk, and that their staff have no training to provide care or manage bio-medical waste.
The court gave them only partial reason: rather than serving as field hospitals, the hotels will only be reception centers for the less serious patients.
“It’s like falling asleep in a hotel and the next morning you wake up and you are told that your hotel has become a hospital,” said Greesh Bindra. “We are in the hotel industry, not in health.”
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