New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi studied past pandemics and their impact during the early days of lockdown to firm up the country’s strategy against the deadly Covid-19 virus. And he decided to save lives over livelihoods, believing that economy could be rebuilt later if the government succeeds in saving lives by ramping up health care facilities, a strategy which also included his idea of converting rail coaches into Covid care centres to handle a possible outburst of the disease in rural India, revealed Union minister Piyush Goyal.
“From end March to end June we saw the economy came to a standstill except a few essential sectors, by and large the country was in a complete lockdown. It had its toll on the economy, Prime Minister Modi was very clear that if we can save lives we can always rebuild the economy,” said Piyush Goyal.
Highlighting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strategy, Goyal said it would have been an irretrievable loss if the country had lost a large number of people under the stress of saving the economy.
Goyal, who holds the dual portfolio of railways, and commerce and industries ministries, says Prime Minister Modi’s strategy was also to develop the country’s own capacity to fight the pandemic.
“We had just one lab with 250 tests per day capacity then, and today we are doing 1.5 million tests a day which has helped us to get a grip on the Covid story as it panned out,” Goyal Tuesday told audience in a programme organised by London based financial services group IHS Markit.
Study of past pandemics, use of railway infrastructure
Goyal said Prime Minister Modi was studying the impact of other pandemics in March this year when the infection rate in the country was still extremely low.
“In early March when we had just 400-500 cases, he was all the time studying what happened in the past pandemics, what happened in the past, and the problems the world faced,” Goyal informed.
Goyal said he was shocked by the Prime Minister’s suggestion to convert railway coaches into Covid care centres but later he realised that it was the only way to provide healthcare to India’s vast rural population in the event of a major surge in Covid cases in hinterland India.
“It hit me like a thunderbolt because Railways is supposed to transport people,” Goyal told the audience, adding that when his team sat down to study the proposal they realised it was a fantastic idea.
“Think about India's 6,00,000 villages, it is nearly impossible to take medical facilities to interiors of India or to move the patients to city hospitals in the event of a wide outburst of Covid in our villages,” he said.
According to the last census conducted in 2011, over 830 million people, more than two-third of the country’s population, lived in the country’s over 6,40,000 villages. Population size in these villages varies hugely, from 500 persons to over 10,000 in some large villages and health care facilities in the vast number of villages are virtually non-existent.
“By converting our coaches to care centres we could move them across the length and breadth of the country as we have railway stations across the country and provide Covid care to them,” Goyal explained the rationale behind Prime Minister Modi’s idea of converting the railway coaches into Covid care centres.
By June this year, Indian Railways was able to convert over 5,200 coaches into Covid care centres with a facility to treat 16 mild Covid patients in each coach.
In June, the Centre also provided over 500 such converted coaches to the Delhi government when the Union territory faced a surge in the number of Covid cases.
Tracking Oxygen supply
Providing medical care to Covid patients in rural India, in the event of a major outbreak in coming months, was just one of the few problems that the country had to tackle.
In cities, the situation was not any better due to lack of ventilators and other facilities. Ensuring enough supply of oxygen was one of the major challenges for policy makers.
“Sometime in March-April, he (Prime Minister Modi) put me on the job to watch out for oxygen consumption and its availability in the country. Since then we have been mapping it every week,” Goyal said.
According to reports, at the start of lockdown in March this year, the country was using around 750 tonnes of medical grade oxygen a day, which has gone up by three times to 2,800 tonnes a day in the last six months.
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According to reports, hospitals in several states, including the worst affected state of Maharashtra also the national capital Delhi, faced problems in procuring medical oxygen in recent months. The increased demand not only put pressure on the supply chain but the price of medical oxygen also went up during the recent months.
Goyal, however, said the government had a complete picture of oxygen availability, demands from various centres and how we would meet the demand of the increased use of oxygen during the lockdown.
India has come to terms with Covid: Goyal
Goyal said the country has come to terms with the Covid due to its young population and a low mortality rate in comparison with other worst affected countries like the USA and Brazil.
“We are coming to terms with the Covid, we have young population, lowest mortality in the world at around 1.5%, except comorbidities we are recovering very fast, most cases are asymptomatic, recovery rate is nearly 90% and number of active cases are under 1 million,” he told the audience.
Citing the official data, Goyal said the daily count had also fallen from 1, 00,000 a day to 36,000 a day, many of the patients were asymptomatic and did not require oxygen or hospitalisation.
Sudden drop in infection numbers comes under criticism
However, a day after Goyal’s assertion, the sudden drop registered in India’s infection rate over the last three weeks or so has come under sharp criticism from one of India’s largest diagnostic chains.
Thyrocare Technologies Wednesday said many state governments were controlling COVID-19 testing to show that their infection numbers were lower than other states.
“In some states, Thyrocare has been told not to pick up samples, verbally. In some states, (it’s like) ‘don’t report to ICMR, reverse the data, we will tell you the cut-off, then you report’,” A Velumani, CMD of Thyrocare Technologies told a news channel.
Velumani also criticised the use of rapid antigen test instead of RT-PCR test, which is considered the gold standard for testing Covid infection, as antigen test is believed to be less accurate in detecting the infection.
