Centre releases Rs 890cr for Covid fight - Aid to help improve testing facilities, add hospital infrastructure

TT   |   New Delhi   |    07.08.20  :  The Centre has released Rs 890 crore to 22 states and Union Territories as the second instalment of a financial package to improve healthcare infrastructure to respond to the coronavirus epidemic, the Union health ministry said on Thursday.

The health ministry said the financial aid was intended to be used to improve testing facilities, add hospital infrastructure such as intensive care unit beds, oxygen generators and bedside oxygen concentrators, among others, and to provide training and incentives to healthcare workers.

The recipient states are Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim.

The Centre had in April released the first instalment of Rs 3,000 crore to all states and Union Territories to ramp up testing, augment hospital infrastructure, procure drugs and other supplies and conduct surveillance.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had in his address to the nation on March 24 said the central government would provision Rs 15,000 crore for the treatment of patients with the coronavirus disease and for strengthening medical infrastructure across India.

The health ministry said that under the financial package, states and Union Territories had established around 580,000 isolation beds, 136,000 oxygen-supported beds and 31,255 intensive care unit beds in Covid-19 hospitals. The states and Union Territories have also added over 96,000 healthcare staff and incentives have been provided to over 665,799, the ministry said.

India’s 1,370 testing labs collectively screened over 600,000 samples for the third consecutive day on Wednesday. But several states continue to show test positivity rates — the proportion testing positive among those tested — higher than what health experts say is the ideal of below 5 per cent.

Health officials have stressed the need for aggressive testing as part of a strategy to detect as many Covid-19 positive persons as possible to isolate and treat them and curb the spread of the infection.

The health ministry had said earlier this week that 28 states and Union Territories were performing more than 140 tests per day per million population, a threshold for comprehensive testing set by the World Health Organisation.

However, the seven-day rolling average test positivity rates for Delhi, Maharashtra and Telangana on Thursday were all 16 per cent or higher.

India on Thursday recorded 56,282 new Covid-19 cases, raising the total number of lab-confirmed cases to 1,964,536, of whom 595,501 patients are under medical supervision, 1,328,836 have recovered and 40,699 have died, 944 deaths over the past day.

The health ministry has said the focused and coordinated implementation of its test, track and treat strategy has helped in early identification and effective clinical treatment, which in turn have resulted in lowering the case fatality rate from 3.36 per cent on June 17 to 2.69 per cent on July 11 to 2.07 per cent on August 6.

Health minister Harsh Vardhan, interacting with the WHO South East Asia region’s regional director on Thursday, said India’s containment strategy had been successful. Ten states account for 82 per cent of the country’s cases.