Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Saturday reviewed the availability of oxygen, ventilators, manpower, and hospital beds with 11 high-burden states reporting massive surge in coronavirus cases.
He assured the states that the union government will continue to assist them in fight against the pandemic.
In a high-level review meeting with health ministers of 11 states, Harsh Vardhan took stock the containment steps taken by these states. The meeting lasted for about three hours.
Vardhan presented a snapshot of the unprecedented rise in new cases at the outset and noted that India is currently reporting the sharpest growth rate of 7.6 per cent in new cases, which is 1.3 times higher than case growth rate of 5.5 per cent reported in June 2020.
"This is leading to an alarming rise in daily number of active Cases, which currently stand at 1,679,000. There is also a sharp growth of 10.2 per cent in the number of deaths.The widening gap between daily new cases and daily new recoveries reflects that the infection is spreading at a much faster rate than recoveries with consistently growing active cases,” Vardhan said.
All the 11 states and UTs have already crossed their highest reported daily case threshold with some districts like Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Nashik, Thane, Lucknow, Raipur, Ahmedabad and Aurangabad also following the same pattern.
During the meeting, the state health ministers shared a brief snapshot of the actions taken for containment, surveillance and treatment of the Covid positive cases.
The issues of augmenting supply of oxygen cylinders; stepping up supply of Remdesivir in hospitals; adding to the ventilator stock; and enhanced supply of vaccine doses were raised by almost all the states and UTs.
Many of them raised the issue of dovetailing the medical oxygen supply lines and the capping of prices of essential drugs like Remdesivir which has been sold in the black market at exorbitant prices. Double mutant strain in Maharashtra was a key point of concern.
The Delhi government requested for additional beds in central government hospitals as was done in 2020 to help tide over the emergent health crisis.
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