India's Response Against COVID-19 Proactive, Pre-Emptive: Health Minister At WHO Meet

India stands on a better footing than the rest of the world, Harsh Vardhan said.

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 at an online WHO meet on Thursday.

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

He said that the government intends to increase the numbers of government labs to three hundred and ramp up the present daily testing capacity of 55,000 to 1 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," Harsh Vardhan said while 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 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.

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, Harsh 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 labs along 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 to one lakh per day by May 31."

Elaborating further on the preparations made by the country to deal with the crisis, he said the government has classified COVID-19 treatment facilities, based on severity of the disease, into three categories - COVID Care Centres for patients with mild symptoms, COVID Health Care Centres for patients with medium symptoms and dedicated COVID Hospitals for patients with severe symptoms.

These three types of COVID-19 centres are duly mapped to facilitate transfer of patients as per the severity of the case.