NEW DEHLI, Apr 24:
India’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic has been “proactive, pre-emptive and graded” in handling the situation arising out of COVID-19 outbreak, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan has said.
Reiterating that the country was first to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak and stood on a better footing than the rest of the world because of the sincere services of its Corona warriors, he told Health Ministers of member countries of World Health Organisation (WHO) that India had acquired enough strength and resources to take on the worst challenge thrown by Coronavirus.
His remarks came while taking part in a virtual interactive session with Health Ministers of member countries of World Health Organisation (WHO) on Thursday on the measures being taken for containment of COVID-19, an official release here said.
The Government had ensured preparedness for high loads of patients in times to come, he said, adding that COVID treatment facilities had been categorised based on severity of the disease into three: COVID Care Centres for patients with mild symptoms, COVID Health Care Centres ? for patients with medium symptoms and Dedicated COVID Hospitals for patients with severe symptoms.
These three types of COVID centres are duly mapped to facilitate transfer of patients as per the severity of the case.
“We have in all 2,033 dedicated facilities in the country with more than 1,90,000 isolation beds, more than 24,000 ICU beds and more than 12,000 ventilators. All these facilities have been organised within last three months,” he told the ministers.
Terming the current situation on COVID-19 in the world as alarming, he said it required special measures to mitigate the number of casualties and urged the WHO officials to work together by sharing best practices to eradicate the disease.
In the case of India, he said, “We know the enemy and its whereabouts. We are able to check this enemy through community surveillance, issuance of various advisories, cluster containment and dynamic strategy.”
Elaborating on how the crisis arising out of COVID-19 had been turned into an opportunity to strengthen the healthcare delivery system in the country, Dr Harsh Vardhan said, “We had only one lab at the National Institute of Virology (NIV) at Pune, to perform tests for COVID-19 initially.
During the last three months we have scaled up the number of government labs to 230 aided by another 87 private labs with more than 16,000 collection centres. Till now we have tested more than five lakh people for COVID-19. We are going to increase the numbers of government labs to 300 and ramp up our present daily testing capacity of 55,000 to one lakh a day by May 31.”
Referring to the app developed for those who wanted to know about the risk hovering around them, Dr Harsh Vardhan highlighted the effectiveness of ‘AarogyaSetu’ mobile application, which has been downloaded by more than 7.2 crore people in the country.
It is a mobile application developed by the Government of India to connect essential health services with the people of India in the combined fight against COVID-19.
The app is aimed at augmenting the initiatives of the Union Government, in proactively reaching out to and informing the users of the app, regarding risks, best practices and relevant advisories pertaining to the containment of COVID-19.
Concluding his session, he appreciated the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying, “We have a great leader in our PM as he is very receptive and accommodating to the suggestions given by experts from time to time, which in turn has led to India handling the COVID-19 situation effectively.
People have also supported our efforts in making the lockdown successful,” he added. (UNI)
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