India’s approach in the fight against coronavirus outbreak has been proactive and is defined by the attitude to ‘chase the virus instead of letting it chase us’, a health ministry official said on Sunday while revealing that the total number of infections in the country had reached 3374 with 79 incidents of deaths including 11 since Saturday.
The government officials also confirmed that 274 districts across the country had reported at least one positive case of coronavirus disease.
“Total 3374 confirmed Covid-19 cases have been reported till now, including an additional 472 new cases that have been reported since yesterday. Total 79 deaths reported including 11 additional deaths since yesterday. 267 persons have also recovered from Covid-19,” said Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secy, Health Ministry.
Agarwal added that the number of cases in the country was doubling every 4.1 days.
“The doubling rate for the cases of Covid-19 cases in the country is presently 4.1 days and this would have been 7.4 days had the Tablighi jamaat cases not surfaced,” Agarwal added.
Agarwal was referring to a group of religious congregants in Delhi’s Nizamuddin that have spread the infection in at least 17 states and are said to be the source of at least one-third of all positive infections in the country.
The officials said that the Cabinet secretary held a review meeting with the district magistrates of all districts in the country which was also attended by the chief secretaries of all states where officials shared different successful containment strategies deployed in their respective territories. Agarwal said the successful strategies could be summed up in two points- proactive and ruthless containment and over-preparedness.
“Proactive and ruthless containment implementation at field level and secondly preparedness to the extent of over preparedness to deal with all situations,” Agarwal said, highlighting the takeaways from the meeting.
He said that delineating buffer and containment zones and the necessary ring-fencing of the disease was crucial to the containment strategy and added that the government’s approach has been proactive since the very beginning.
“Instead of the virus chasing us, we chase the virus, our approach has been proactive since the very beginning,” Agarwal added.
On the issue of a shortage of personal protective equipment, Agarwal said the shortage was being overcome by local manufacturing and import. He said available PPEs have been dispatched to the states on the basis of number of cases and the district authorities have been advised to use them judiciously.
