Health Ministry said that India is entirely prepared to fight an exponential rise in coronavirus cases as the total number of cases near 9000-mark.
New Delhi| The Health Ministry on Sunday alleviated any concerns over India’s readiness to fight the rising number of COVID-19 cases and said the government has always been on top of the challenge by using the mantra of “over preparedness”.
Health Ministry Joint Secretary Lav Aggarwal while addressing the media via the daily press conference, said, “We are extra prepared in case of an exponential rise in COVID-19 cases.”
On Sunday, India recorded a spike of 909 cases, taking the country’s total number of coronavirus cases to 8,356. With 34 fatalities since Saturday, India’s coronavirus death toll has risen to 273.
The health ministry, however, said that only 20 per cent of these cases needed ICU support.
To show that the country has been sufficiently scaling up its capacity in areas of testing, training and hospitalization to stay ahead of the curve of the disease, Health ministry’s joint secretary Lav Agarwal presented data.
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“As of today, if we need 1,671 beds for COVID-19 patients, but we have more than 1 lakh 5 thousand beds available,” said Lav Agarwal.
Agarwal added, “We are increasing COVID-19 hospitals and isolation beds, this pandemic can result in an exponential rise in cases, which is why we are preparing in advance. Continuous training of medical professionals to manage COVID-19 cases has been done at the national and the state level. We are over-prepared.”
The government’s testing capacity had firmly increased to 219 labs including 68 from the private sector, an ICMR representative present at the briefing said. He added that the average number of tests per day for the past five days has consistently been over the figure of 15,000.
“A total of 1,86,906 samples have been tested so far, of which 7,953 were found to be positive for COVID-19,” said the CMR representative.
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