New Delhi, Aug 6 (UNI) India’s graded multi-level institutional response to Covid made it possible to have very low cases per million and deaths per million in spite of having a high population density and low fractional GDP spending and per capita doctor and hospital bed availability compared to developed countries, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Thursday.
Speaking at a virtual meeting of the Regional Director of WHO for South East Asia (SEA) Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh with Ministers for Health of the member states of the region, he said as a strategy, India divided its facilities into Covid and Non-Covid facilities for better management of the severe from the moderate and mild categories of patients.
This ensured that hospital facilities were un-burdened to ensuring effective treatment of the hospitalised cases and helped to keep India Case Fatality rate below the global average. "Today it has touched 2.07 per cent," he told the meet focused on maintaining essential health services and public health programmes in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
On the efficacy of Lockdown, Dr Harsh Vardhan expanded how it was "effective in slowing down the rate of growth of cases and gave the government time to augment the health infrastructure and testing facilities."
"From one lab in January, India has 1,370 labs today. Indians anywhere can access a lab within three hours' travel time. As many as 33 of the 36 states and UTs exceed WHO’s recommendation of testing 140 people per million per day." He also stated that the Containment Strategy has been successful in that 50 per cent of the cases are from three States and 32 per cent of the rest are from seven states.
The spread of the virus thus has been contained.
Speaking about India’s tryst with Covid-19, he highlighted how "India had been preparing for the pandemic as soon as China informed WHO on January 7". Earlier viral outbreaks like the Avian Influenza, H1N1 epidemic Influenza, Zika and Nipah had provided institutional memory in "designing containment and management strategies using 'whole of government' approach," he added.
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