Amritsar:Amid coronavirus crisis, political leaders including Prime minister Narendra Modi is actively seeking suggestions and taking feedback from opposition leaders, party leaders and experts from various fields.
The similar idea is adopted by regional leaders and continuing the practice, Health Ministers of Punjab, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Puducherry through video conference shared best practices adopted in their states to contain the spread of COVID-19.
Each State/ UT shared its strategy and apprehending future spike in COVID-19 cases agreed upon the need to scale up tracing and testing.
Mr Balbir Singh Sidhu, Health Minister Punjab appraised his counterparts that Punjab has ramped up testing capacity ten-fold with the procurement of requisite machines.
Punjab intends to launch a rapid testing drive aiming to screen one million people, he said. Gearing up for this, acquisition of 10 lakh Rapid Testing Kits (RTK) has been approved by the Punjab Cabinet and order for requisition of one lakh kits from ICMR has been placed.
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Punjab Health Minister informed that modalities are being worked out for manufacturing PPE kits at Ludhiana which once operational would enable Punjab not just to meet its own requirement but would have sufficient kits to supply to other states.
During the video conference, some of the Health Ministers suggested setting up of testing facility at every district headquarters, in case of exponential growth in COVID-19 cases.
So far, Influenza like Illness (ILI) cases or those with international travel history or the contacts of COVID-19 patients are being screened but asymptomatic cases being found positive in different parts of the country is an alarming phenomenon which calls for better preparation, agreed all.
Besides others, the Video Conference was attended by Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor (both Members of Parliament) as well as Padma Bhushan, Sam Pitroda.
