Union health minister Harash Vardhan claimed on Tuesday that India’s “preemptive, proactive and graded approach” ensured a “plateaued” graph of COVID-19 cases and a significant number of unoccupied beds in the health facilities at any point of time. Harsh Vardhan made the remarks during his conversation with his Swedish counterpart Lena Hallengren, while discussing co-operation in the field of health and medicine, according to a statement issued by the Union Health ministry.
“India’s pro-active, pre-emptive and graded approach ensured a plateaued graph and significant number of unoccupied beds at any point of time in the three-tiered COVID health infrastructure assembled by the government,” a health ministry statement quoted Harash Vardhan has having said.
India’s Covid-19 tally: From one lakh cases in 110 days to 7 lakh in just 49 days
Harsh Vardhan’s claim comes even as a record rise of Covid 19 cases seen recently, including the single-highest spike of 22,252 new cases on Tuesday, taking the total number of infections registered in the country to 7,19,665, have catapulted India to number three spot among the worst affected countries after the USA and Brazil. However, the country still boasts of a very low number of infections and deaths per million.
Harsh Vardhan, too, underscored those statistics to highlight the relative successes of New Delhi’s containment strategy.
“India has a recovery rate of more than 61 per cent and a mortality of as low as 2.78 per cent in spite of being a country of 1.35 billion,” he said and pointed out that 2.5 lakh people are being tested in the country every day in more than 1,100 labs set up in the last 3-4 months.
For Coronavirus Live Updates
The minister stated that the Indian government’s approach was to use the pandemic outbreak as an opportunity.
“India now has over 100 PPE manufacturing units manufacturing 5 lakh PPE per day and has also similarly ramped up its production of N95 masks and ventilators. India has supplied Hydrochloroxyquine to more than 100 countries,” Vardhan is said to have told the Swedish minister.
The health minister was congratulated by Hallengren on being elected the Chair of WHO Executive Board. She also praised India for increasing the testing capacity so that more and more people can be diagnosed and treated early.
Source: HindustanTimes