Not anticipating worst situation in India: Vardhan on COVID-19 pandemic

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Saturday said that he does not anticipate a "very worst type of situation" in India like in many developed countries due to COVID-19 pandemic, but the government has made adequate preparations.

Holding a review meeting to take stock of the the status of COVID-19 in the northeastern states, Vardhan said the doubling time of coronavirus infection cases in the country for the last three days has been about 11 days and 9.9 days for the last seven days.

"We do not anticipate a very worst type of situation in our country like many other developed countries but still we have prepared the whole country for the worst situation," he said during the meeting.

On the country's health infrastructure preparedness, Vardhan said 8,043 hospitals exclusively for COVID treatment having a capacity of about 1,65,991 beds and 1,991 dedicated COVID health centres having a capacity of 1,35,643 beds including isolation and ICU beds have been readied across the country.

He said 7,640 quarantine centres have been created all over the country which may be used for migrant workers and also for keeping people coming from abroad.

Also, the centre has distributed 69 lakh N-95 masks to various state government and 32.76 lakh PPEs have also been distributed across the country.

The testing capacity for COVID-19 has been scaled up in the country with around 95,000 tests per day and a total 15,25,631 tests have been conducted so far across 332 government and 121 private laboratories, he said.

"Yesterday we have tested 84,608 people in the country and our testing capacity is for doing about 95,000 tests per day in the country now," Vardhan said.

The death toll due to COVID-19 rose to 1,981 and the number of cases climbed to 59,662 on Saturday registering an increase of 95 deaths and 3,320 cases in the last 24 hours since Friday 8 AM, according to the Health Ministry data.

Stating that of the total cases reported from the country, 17847 people have recovered, Vardhan said the COVID-19 fatality rate in the country is 3.3 per cent and recovery rate is 29.9 per cent.

He also added that (as of yesterday) there are 2.41 per cent present active COVID-19 patients in ICU, 0.38 per cent on ventilators and 1.88 per cent on oxygen support, he said.

The minister, who reviewed the status of COVID-19 in the north-eastern states along with the measures taken for its containment and management, asked the states having orange zone districts to make efforts towards converting them into infection free green zones while asking others to maintain their protective status, a health ministry statement said.