India’s Doubling Rate now 17.4 Days; The Recovery Rate Now Stands At 49.47% – Covid 19

Recovery rate of COVID-positive cases in India touched 49.47 per cent on Friday with 6,166 more patients recovering from the infection in the last 24 hours. With this development, the total number of recovered patients in India is now 1,47,194 as compared to 1,41,842 active cases so far.

Apart from the rate of recovery, the doubling rate/time of the spread of the infection has also increased from 3.4 days at the beginning of the nationwide lockdown on March 25 to 17.4 days on June 12. The same has been confirmed with a press release issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) on Friday.

In this backdrop, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba held a video conference with Chief Secretaries, Health Secretaries and Urban Development Secretaries of all states. The states have been advised to focus on containment, testing and tracing, health infrastructure up-gradation, case clinical management and community engagement for effective handling of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Rajiv Gauba also told states to pay special attention to the emerging epicentres and undertake stringent containment measures to check the spread of the virus. States were advised that active house-to-house surveillance through special teams in containment zones is critical for early identification of cases.

Furthermore, the states were requested to expedite up-gradation of hospital infrastructure so as to manage the cases as per projections besides ensuring sufficient logistics (eg. pulse oximeters), and trained human resources (doctors, staff nurses, non-clinical staff).

The Centre also conveyed that going forward, preventive measures are extremely important especially for the vulnerable populations, including the elderly and co-morbid patients. Timely referrals based on symptoms and improvement in clinical practices with the help of Centres of Excellence in collaboration with AIIMS, Delhi was also specifically mentioned during the interaction. Cabinet Secretary Gauba also requested states to undertake extensive community outreach to encourage social distancing and other preventative measures.

Meanwhile, the ICMR has ramped up the testing capacity for the detection of Covid-19 among infected persons. A total of 877 labs are presently operational across India for this purpose. These include 837 state-run labs and 240 private labs. As many as 1,50,305 samples have been tested for Covid-19 in the last 24 hours while at the same time, a total of 53,63,445 samples have been tested for the infection across India to date.

Source: India Today