New Delhi: Amid nation's relentless fight against COVID-19 pandemic, the central government on Friday has appointed Rajesh Bhushan as the new Union Health Secretary replacing incumbent secretary Preeti Sudan. Bhushan will take charge on July 31.
Bhushan, a 1987 batch IAS officer of Bihar cadre, at present is serving as the Officer on Special Duty (OSD) in the Health Ministry.
Notably, Sudan, a 1983 batch IAS officer of Andhra Pradesh cadre will complete her extension period of three months on July 31.
Meanwhile, the nation has proposed to set up a Sub-Group on Traditional Medicine under the existing Institutional Meetings of the SCO Health Ministers to fulfil the WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2014-2023.
“There is currently no institutional mechanism within SCO to discuss cooperation in Traditional Medicine that has the potential to fulfil the WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2014-2023 and also reinforce the effective implementation of the Joint Statement on cooperation in combating epidemics signed at the Qingdao Summit in 2018. This is despite such complementary medicine systems being widely practised in all member states of our SCO,” said Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan while addressing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Health Minister's Digital Meet in New Delhi.
Read:|Harsh Vardhan attends Health Ministers of Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting
He informed that India has so far reported 1.25 million cases and more than 30,000 deaths due to the coronavirus pandemic. “At 864 cases per million and less than 21 deaths per million of our population, India has one of the world’s lowest infection and death rates. Our recovery rate stands at 63.45 per cent whereas our mortality at 2.3 per cent,” Dr Vardhan stated.
Talking about India’s fight against COVID-19, Dr Vardhan said that a series of actions were initiated in a graded way that included issuing of travel advisories, point-of-entry surveillance, community-based surveillance, enhancement of laboratory and hospital surge capacities, wide dissemination of technical guidelines on managing different aspects of disease outbreak and communicating risk to the public.
“The consecutive lockdowns provided the nation with much required time and opportunity to build upon technical knowhow, laboratory capacities, hospital infrastructure along with pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions,” he said in the virtual meeting.
Meanwhile, the trend of the highest ever single-day recoveries of COVID-19 patients continues unabated with 34,602 patients recovering in the last 24 hours. This has significantly bolstered the total number of recovered patients to cross 8 lakh and currently stands at 8,17,208.
In the last 24 hours, India tested 3,52,801 samples taking the total number to more than 1.5 crores. This translates to 11179.83 tests per million (TPM) for India, which has seen a steady increase since the adoption of the testing strategy through a total of 1290 labs.
Read:|India's COVID-19 recovery rate reaches 62.72%: Health Ministry
