Observing that despite festivals in the month of October-November, no new surge of COVID-19 cases had been observed in this period due to comprehensive testing, tracking and treatment policy implemented on the ground, the Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Saturday said, “India’s COVID-19 pandemic growth is currently at 2% and case fatality rate (CFR) is amongst lowest in the world at 1.45% now.”
Chairing the 22nd meeting of the high-level Group of Ministers (GoM) on COVID-19, he said, “India’s COVID recovery rate has peaked to 95.46% while the strategy of testing 1 million samples has decreased the cumulative positivity rate to 6.25%. But there is still a need to diligently maintain COVID appropriate behaviour at a time when the country is at the cusp of authorising the first set of vaccines.”
He also expressed the need for an expeditious vaccination drive to cover all the target populations, estimated to be around 30 crore.
Briefing the GoM on requests for vaccines received by the Ministry of External Affairs from 12 other countries, Vinod K. Paul, Member (Health), NITI Aayog provided a detailed presentation on three critical aspects of vaccination, the process of pre-clinical and clinical trial of all vaccines, details of six vaccine candidates undergoing trial in India (in terms of composition, manufacturers and technical partners, numbers of doses, and conditions for storage and efficacy), and the composition of target populations in India in terms of age, occupation and co-morbidities, and how they compare with other countries and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommendations.
Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, noting the importance of health-seeking behaviour in the population as a key driver in checking COVID-19 fatality, said that the Ministry was seeing a paradox with some States /UTs reporting very high [number of] cases but minimal fatalities while others reported low [number of] cases but comparatively high fatalities. He noted that this phenomenon resulted from people not coming forward for testing even if they were symptomatic in the second category of States.
“People in States/UTs with a vibrant public healthcare system are tracked and encouraged to be tested by grassroots health workers, which inhibits the progress of COVID in the patient to an advanced stage, which allows these States to keep their fatality rate at minimum,” he said.
Meanwhile, India reported 347 COVID-19 case fatalities in the past 24 hours, with Maharashtra reporting the maximum of new daily deaths at 75 deaths, and West Bengal seeing a fatality count of 42.
