U’khand forms experts’ panel to ramp up fight against Covid

DEHRADUN: The Uttarakhand government on Friday announced constitution of a committee that will provide technical inputs to it for effective containment of the Covid-19 in the state.

The committee has been mandated to analyse best practices adopted in other states of the country or anywhere in the world. The committee has also been mandated to consider published studies and analyse them to suggest actionable points.

Pankaj Kumar Pandey, secretary (incharge) health department, issued an order in this regard. “In the present scenario of Covid-19 infection transmission in Uttarakhand, it becomes imperative to develop datadriven policies and evidencebased action for containment of Covid-19 and dengue. It is pertinent to form up a technical committee comprising of senior public health experts from medical colleges in the state. The committee is expected to provide technical inputs to the government for informed decision making,” the order said.

According to the order, the chief operation officer of Covid control room in the state will be responsible for providing all the available data to the committee members on a weekly basis at a scheduled time preferably by each Friday evening.

The committee can also acquire district data from respective chief medical officers also. The committee has been asked to prepare a weekly report preferably every Monday.

The committee has been mandated to look into a range of issues related to Covid-19 situation in the state like risk factors associated with Covid-19 transmission, causal analysis of deaths of positive people, in-depth analysis of socio-demographic profile, testing patterns, co-morbidities, symptomatology and severity of the virus spread.

The committee will look into infection prevention and control in healthcare workers and workplace safety, epidemiological/lab surveillance in containment zones, the impact of Covid-19 on healthcare facilities, and overall health impact assessment.

The committee comprises Prof Devrat Roy, associate professor at Government Doon Medical College Dehradun as its chairman. Other four members include Dr Sadhna Awasthi, associate professor at government medical college Haldwani, Prof Amit Singh from government medical college Almora, DR Arjit Kumar, associate professor from government medical college Srinagar and Dr Vikas Sharma from WHO unit Uttarakhand.

After the first case was reported on March 15 in the state, so far 2984 positive cases have been reported in the state till Thursday evening.

A total of 42 Covid-19 positive patients have died in Uttarakhand till now with four patients dying due to the contagion.

The rate of doubling of cases based on last seven days stands at 57.56 days in the state, while the recovery rate has reached 80.60%. Uttarakhand has so far tested over 72,000 samples of which results of over 5,900 are awaited.

COMMITTEE HAS ALSO BEEN MANDATED TO CONSIDER PUBLISHED STUDIES AND ANALYSE THEM TO SUGGEST ACTIONABLE POINTS.