New Delhi: Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday said that India is gradually moving in the direction to win the battle against COVID-19 pandemic.
“Less than 2 percent of the COVID affected patients are admitted in ICUs. Our lab network has been strengthened; we have had exponential growth in the number of labs which have grown from one in Jan 2020 to 1234 today. As on date, we have tested more than 3.26 samples per day,” said Dr Vardhan while inaugurating the Rajkumari Amrit Kaur OPD Block of AIIMS.
He said that testing capacity will be further enhanced to 10 lakh tests per day in the coming 12 weeks.
“This is matched with progressively increasing recovered cases and the steadily increasing gap between recovered and active cases (2,81,668). This signifies that the measures taken as part of the graded, pre-emptive and pro-active approach under the ‘Whole of Government’ strategy is showing positive results,” the minister said.
Dr Vardhan asked AIIMS authorities to strengthen the infrastructure and machinery of the hospital. “There must be zero tolerance for poor and substandard quality of care and towards patients’ inconvenience”, he said.
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One of the largest such track-based laboratory automation installations across the Asia Pacific, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur OPD Block has a capacity of expansion up to 2 lakh tests per day, with a handling capacity of more than 10000 patients per day.
Meanwhile, India has witnessed the highest single-day spike of 32, 695 COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, the country has registered a sharp increase in the recovery cases of COVID-19 patients and decline in the number of active cases in the last one month.
A statistic from the union health ministry said that from mid-June 2020 after crossing the 50 per cent mark in Recovery Rate, there is a steady increase in the recovered patients and decline in the number of active cases. 63.25 per cent of the COVID-19 patients have recovered, so far. Simultaneously, there has been a steady dip in the active cases, from around 45 per cent in mid-June 2020 to around 34.18 per cent, as of now.
The health ministry said that India’s targeted measures have contributed to a steady decline in the number of active cases. As on date, the actual caseload of COVID-19 patients in the country is only 3,31,146.
The actual caseload of COVID-19 has remained limited and manageable in the country due to proactive measures of containment including house-to-house survey, perimeter control activities, timely contact tracing and surveillance of containment zones, aggressive testing and timely diagnosis, and effective clinical management of the moderate and severe cases through a well-implemented standard of care protocol substantially increasing their chances of recovery, the health ministry said.
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A total of 20,783 people have been cured in the last 24 hours taking the total number of recovered cases to 6,12,814.
Of the total 36 states and UTs, only 10 States continue to constitute 84.62 per cent of the total active caseload. Two states, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu constitute 48.15 per cent of the country's total active caseload.
As many as 3,26,826 samples have been tested in the last 24 hours taking the total number of testing to 1,27,39,490 and translated to a figure of 9231.5 testings per million population in the country. India has 1234 COVID-19 testing labs at present.
