We’re prepared for the worst: Health minister

new delhi — We do not anticipate the worst kind of situation in India like other developed countries, which are badly hit by Covid-19 crisis, but still we have prepared the whole country for the worst possible scenario, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Saturday.

Vardhan while interacting with health ministers and senior officials of north-eastern states, through video conferencing, on the mitigation efforts to address Covid-19 crisis said the fatality rate in the country continues to be around 3.3 per cent and the recovery rate of coronavirus patients has climbed up to 29.9 per cent, and these are very good indicators.

“Doubling rate of cases for the last three days has been about 11 days. For the past seven days the doubling rate has been 9.9 days and, for the last 14 days it is 10.7. Today, we do not anticipate the worst kind of situation in India like other developed countries, but still we have prepared the whole country for the worst situation,” said Vardhan.

The remarks from the health minister has come on the heels of a statement made by Lav Agarwal, joint secretary Health Ministry,

saying citizens must learn to live with the coronavirus. “As we talk of relaxations to lockdown, we have to deal with the challenge of learning to live with the virus, for this we need to make the required prevention measures a part of our life, through a behaviour change process,” Agarwal had said on Friday.

Vardhan added that currently 843 hospitals are exclusively dedicated for Covid-19 patients’ treatment, which have about 165,991 beds. “Across the country, there are 1,991 dedicated Covid-19 health centres which have 135,643 beds. They include isolation as well as ICU beds,” he added.

Vardhan also cited there are 7,645 quarantine centres across the country. “We have distributed 6.9 million N-95 masks to various state governments. A total of 3.28 million PPEs have been distributed to state governments by the centre. We started from one testing lab in Pune and now we have over 453 labs in the country,” said Vardhan.

“Yesterday evening we evaluated the data from various states and found that only 0.38 per cent of the patients were on the ventilators. 1.88 per cent requiring oxygen support and 2.21 per cent were on ICU beds,” he added. —