Hospital chain, banks, hotels join hands to create isolation rooms

In a unique initiative to combat the Covid-19 crisis, a large healthcare, a clutch of financial backers and a bunch of hospitality players are coming together to create additional real estate for isolation rooms for those patients who aren’t critically ill and don’t necessarily need to be in hospital beds. This move is aimed at reducing the pressure on the country’s healthcare infrastructure, which is struggling with finding enough hospital beds, ventilators, and other critical equipment needed to fight the novel Coronavirus pandemic.

Spearheaded by Apollo Hospitals Group, the initiative called Project Stay-I (where the ‘I’ stands for isolation) is being financially supported by State Bank of India (SBI), Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and Deutsche Bank. As a part of the plan, 5,000 hotel rooms will be pooled in from hotel chains such as Lemon Tree, Ginger (part of the Tata group) and Oyo at discounted rates. Zomato will provide food delivery services to those staying in these rooms.

“Project Stay-I is an innovative initiative to strengthen the bulwark against Covid-19 by creating isolation rooms in hotels with light medical supervision for quarantine and creating a barrier to ensure people recover without spreading the virus, and or be supervised so they can move to medical care at the right time,” a statement issued on Monday said. “This also ensures that people who don’t need hospital beds are not using the scarce resource if they are not critically sick. The objective is to create isolation and quarantine facilities away from the main hospitals in cities across the country and reduce the burden on hospitals providing acute care.”

These isolation rooms will be rolled out in Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Delhi. The number rooms may even be ramped if the need arises.

“…with increase in the scale and scope of testing, the number of positive cases is expected to increase. A significant number of these individuals will be positive but asymptomatic. There will also be a rise in the number of individuals requiring to be quarantined due to contact with Covid-19 patients,” says Sangita Reddy, joint managing director, Apollo Hospitals Group. “This will put a huge load on the government facilities for quarantine. This is the time for the private sector to step up to the challenge to aid, augment, and support our government.”

Reddy added that Project Stay-I was a showcase model, which can be replicated by others and that the partner engaged in this project were happy to share the technological backbone needed to make the model work with others.

Due to SBI and HUL’s contributions, 50% of the rooms on the Oyo network that are a part of the programme will be made available free of cost to the needy.

Light medical supervision will also be provided to the people staying in these hotels via telemedicine to ensure that these people recover while remaining isolated and in quarantine. Those whose symptoms worsen will be shifted to institutionalised medical care at the right time.