Only 0.33 Per Cent COVID-19 Patients Are On Ventilators: Dr Harsh Vardhan

New Delhi: Union Minister of Health Dr Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday (April 29) said that of the total number of coronavirus cases only 0.33 per cent people are on ventilators. “Only 0.33 per cent patients are on ventilators, 1.5 per cent patients are on oxygen support and 2.34 per cent patients are in ICU, which reflects the quality of care being provided across the country,” said Dr Vardhan during a video conference with Lions Club International.

Highlighting India’s approach in combating COVID-19, he said,

This time the hallmark of our approach has been fivefold: Maintaining a continuous situation awareness; Pre-emptive and proactive approach; Graded response as per continuously evolving scenario; Inter-sectoral coordination at all levels; and lastly, but most importantly creating a people’s movement to combat this disease.

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Commenting on India’s strengths in tackling the disease, he said, “India has successfully tackled public health emergencies of international concern and pandemics in the past as well.”

Our nation has the requisite national core capacities stipulated in the International Health Regulations to manage public health emergencies. The Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), which is a nation-wide surveillance system for epidemic-prone diseases, has been activated towards COVID-19 response, and is being further strengthened with substantive digital inputs, he added.

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“Since the last three days, the doubling rate is 11.3 days in the country. Although the global mortality rate is around 7 per cent, India is having a mortality rate of around 3 per cent, of which around 86 per cent deaths are of persons with co-morbidity,” said Dr Vardhan.

He also informed that 288 government laboratories are working along with 97 private lab chains with around 16,000 sample collection centres and testing around 60,000 tests per day. Government is working to increase the testing capacity to 1 lakh tests per day within the next few days, he added.

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The Health Minister further said that since the development of a vaccine is going to take a longer time, Lockdown and Social Distancing are serving as effective ‘social vaccine’.

The Ministry of Science & Technology, under my charge, has also been working on innovations and have been funding certain projects which are going to make the testing procedure quite fast, he said.

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