Speed Post News Network
New Delhi : “India’s response has been proactive, pre-emptive, and graded in handling situation arising out of COVID-19 outbreak,” said Union Health & Family Welfare (H&FW) Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on April 23, 2020, while participating in a virtual interactive session with Health Ministers of member countries of World Health Organisation (WHO) on the measures being taken for containment of COVID-19.
At the outset, Dr Vardhan stated, “The current situation on COVID-19 in the world is alarming and requires special measures to mitigate the number of casualties.” Exhorting the WHO officials, he said, “We are meeting in troubled times and we have to work together by sharing our best practices to eradicate COVID-19.”
Dr Vardhan stated, “India was first to respond to COVID -19 and stands on a better footing then the rest of the world because of the valuable and sincere services of Corona warriors.” Referring to the active surveillance efforts made by the Government agencies to monitor potential victims or carriers of the disease, 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.”
Speaking about how the crisis arising out of COVID-19 has been turned into an opportunity to strengthen the healthcare delivery system in the country, Dr Vardhan said, “We had only one Lab at the National Institute of Virology (NIV) at Pune, Maharashtra, to perform tests for COVID-19 initially. During the last 3 months, we have scaled up the number of government labs to 230 aided by another 87 private labs with more than 16,000 collection centers. Till now we have tested more than 5 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 1 lakh per day by May 31,2020.”
Elaborating further on the preparations made by the country to deal with the crisis, he said, “The Government has ensured preparedness for high loads of patients in times to come. It has classified COVID treatment facilities based on severity of the disease into three categories, which are – COVID Care Centers for patients with mild symptoms, COVID Health Care Centers – for patients with medium symptoms and Dedicated COVID Hospitals for patients with severe symptoms. These three types of COVID centers 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 organized within last 3 months.”
Dr Vardhan highlighted the effectiveness of‘AarogyaSetu’mobile application, which has been downloaded by more than 7.2 Crore people. It is a mobile application developed by the Government of India to connect essential health services with the people of India in our combined fight against COVID-19. The App is aimed at augmenting the initiatives of the Government of India in proactively reaching out to and informing the users of the app, about risks, best practices and relevant advisories pertaining to the containment of COVID-19, according to a PIB release.
Concluding his session, Dr Vardhan said, “We have a great leader in our PM Narendra Modi as he 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”.