At G-20 meet, Vardhan highlights India's 'pre-emptive and proactive' approach to deal with COVID-19

Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Sunday said the hallmark of India's efforts in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak has been a pre-emptive and proactive approach as well as creating a people's movement to combat the pandemic.

Speaking at a meeting of G20 ministers organised by the grouping's chair Saudi Arabia via video-conferencing, Vardhan said India has completed 25 days of the lockdown which will further extend till May 3 and its positive results were evident.

"The results of the same were realised when our case doubling rate which was about 3.4 days on March 17, dropped to 4.4 days by March 25, and is currently about 7.4 days," he told the G20 health ministers.

India has successfully tackled public health emergencies of international concern and pandemic in the past as well, Vardhan asserted.

"This time the hallmark of our approach has been fivefold -- maintaining a continuous situation awareness; pre-emptive and proactive approach; graded response as per continuously evolving scenario; inter-sectoral coordination at all levels, and lastly but most importantly creating a people's movement to combat this disease," he said.

"Our efforts have been preemptive and proactive. We started surveillance of flights from COVID-affected countries twelve days before we even had the first case in India on the 30th of Jan 2020," Vardhan said.

By March 22, with less than 400 cases India banned all international flights to and from India, and by March 25 implemented a nationwide lockdown, he pointed out.

"In the past, we as a global community have faced and successfully tackled threats to health of our people, by a collective sense of purpose, supporting and collaborating with each other. I look forward to similar cooperation and mutually respectful & useful collaborations to deal with coronavirus," Vardhan said. While some of the countries particularly Japan, Singapore, South Korea have fared well, others are still struggling with COVID-19, he noted.

The scale of impact is unprecedented and therefore calls for cooperation between nations to attain normalcy, he said.