India ramping up preparation to fight COVID-19: Health Min to WHO member nations

India was first in responding to the COVID-19 crisis and stands on a better footing than the rest of the world because of the valuable and sincere services of 'corona warriors', Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Thursday.

Referring to the active surveillance efforts of the government agencies to monitor potential victims or carriers of the disease, Vardhan said, "Weare able to check this enemy through community surveillance, issuance of various advisories, cluster containment and dynamic strategy".

He said the government intends to increase the numbers of government labs to 300 and ramp up the present daily testing capacity of 55,000 toone lakh per day by May 31.

"India's response has been proactive, pre-emptive and graded in handling the situation arising out of COVID-19 outbreak," Vardhan saidwhile participating in an online interactive session with Health Ministers of member countries of World Health Organization (WHO) on the measures being taken for containment of COVID-19.

Underlining that the current situation on COVID-19 in the world is alarming and requires special measures to mitigate the number of casualties, the minister exhorted the WHO officials and said, "We are meeting in troubled times and we have to work together by sharing our best practices to eradicate coronavirus infection".

The death toll due to COVID-19 rose to 686 and the number of cases climbed to 21,700 in the country on Thursday, according to the Union Health Ministry.

However, a PTI tally of the figures reported by various states as on Thursday showed 22,951 cases and 721 deaths in the country.

There has been a lag in the Union Health Ministry figures, compared to the number of deaths announced by different states, which officials attribute to procedural delays in assigning the cases to individual states.

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, 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 labsalong with 87 private labs.

"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 toone lakh per day by May 31."