New Delhi: As India completes 30 days of COVID-19 lockdown on Thursday, CK Mishra, chairman of an inter-ministerial empowered group said that India is in a better position as far as containment and control of the pandemic is concerned.
"The one-month lockdown has caused hardships to people across India. But we are in a better position today. We were able to minimise spread and increase doubling rate of COVID-19," said Mishra, a 1983 batch IAS officer of Bihar cadre.
It was a usual press briefing of the Health Ministry over COVID-19 but to mark one month of lockdown, Mishra, according to the sources, was asked to brief about the achievements of the Government in its fight against the deadly virus.
Lav Agarwal, a 1996 batch of IAS officer of Andhra Pradesh cadre who has been briefing the media ever since COVID-19 broke out was also present in the briefing.
"We had adopted a multi-pronged strategy to fight against COVID-19 that includes consistently ramping up testing and preparing ourselves for the future," said Mishra who earlier served as Union Health Secretary before assuming his present charge as Union Environment Secretary.
Mishra said that during the last one month there was a rapid increase in the testing strategy.
"On March 23, we had conducted 14,950 tests but on April 22, we had conducted more than five lakh RT PCR testing," said said.
He, however, said that despite a 24-fold increase in testing in the last 30 days, the percentage of positive cases is not rising.
"Since the lockdown, there was no exponential growth in the number of positive cases. It was 606 on March 24, and currently, we have only 21,393 positive cases till April 23," said Mishra.
He mentioned that after 400 cases, such number has tremendously increased in many other countries.
Mishra said the number of dedicated hospitals increased by 3.5 times since last month.
As per government statistics, from 163 dedicated COVID hospitals, the number has reached up to 736 in the last one month. Against the requirement of 4,279 isolation beds, India currently has 1,94,026 such isolation beds in these dedicated COVID hospitals.
Despite all these preparedness and containment strategies against the pandemic, the issue of social stigma is haunting Covid patients.
Admitting the fact, Dr Randeep Guleria, Director, AIIMS said that patients facing social stigma as a major problem.
"Because of this social stigma, people even with flu-like symptoms are not coming. And as a fallout of late reporting, mortality rates of COVID-19 patients are also increasing," said Dr Guleria and added, "We need to remove the sense of fear and panic amongst people over the deadly outbreak."
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