Mumbai: India is installing thousands of beds made of cardboard to temporary medical facilities as it battles to deal with the rising number of CoronaVirus cases.
The low-cost beds are chemically coated to make them waterproof and can hold a 300-kilogramme (660-pound) load, said Vikram Dhawan, who along with his brother came up with the design while they were stuck at home during the country’s months-long lockdown.
“One person can pick it up very comfortably,” Dhawan said at his factory in the northern city of Bhiwandi which already makes cardboard products. “It’s compact, lightweight and can be manufactured and assembled in minutes.”
The New Delhi government is installing 10,000 of the beds in a spiritual center in the suburbs of the city that is being transformed into a dedicated CoronaVirus center.
Mumbai, which like the capital has seen its hospitals flooded by CoronaVirus patients, is also using them.
“The most important thing is that the virus only stays on the surface of cardboard for 24 hours,” Dhawan said. “On any other surface, metal, wood or plastic, it stays for three to four days.”
A study published in March in the US journal NEJM showed the coronavirus can remain for up to three days on plastic but only for 24 hours on cardboard.
“We typically associate beds with steel or wood but the requirement here was such that we needed a kind of disposable or sanitization bed,”
The Dhawan brothers have not publicly revealed the price tag of making each bed, but it reportedly costs around $10.
Once the coronavirus epidemic is over, they see a market for their product. “I think 50 to 60 of our own workers have taken it home and are very happy using it every day,” said Dhawan. “It costs the amount you’d spend each time you go out to eat at a restaurant.”
India’s total of coronavirus cases surpasses the five lakh on Friday after the country reported its highest single-day spike of over 17,000 cases. Maharashtra, the worst-hit state, with over 5,000 new cases, reached an aggregate of 1,52,765, while West Bengal and Tamil Nadu also reported their biggest single day CoronaVirus numbers. This was the seventh day in a row that India registered over 14,000 cases. India is only behind US, Brazil and Russia.