E-Paper
Centre cites four reasons to laud India’s Covid 19 containment efforts
The Indian government has maintained that India’s coronavirus situation cannot be judged on the basis of its Covid 19 tally, which makes it the third worst-affected country in the world.
The Central government on Tuesday presented data to back up claims that India has relatively well handled Covid 19 pandemic outbreak using a strategy of effective containment, surveillance, house to house survey, aggressive testing, prompt isolation followed by treatment, which have yielded good results so far.
A senior health ministry official presented graphs on four aspects of the containment efforts, namely testing, positivity rate, fatality rate and the active case load of the disease to advance its argument.
“As per WHO guidance note, to meet adequate testing parameters, 140 tests per million of population must be conducted per day and this level of testing should continue for a prolonged period of time for it to be effective. 180 tests per million of population is being conducted per day in India presently,” said Rajesh Bhushan, officer on special duty (OSD), health ministry.
He added that as many as 19 Indian states and Union Territories were doing better than the national average benchmark. The top five on the list are Goa with 1,333 tests per million, Dadra Nagar Haveli (DNH) with 750 tests per million, Tripura with 643 tests per million, Tamil Nadu with 571 tests per million and Delhi with 536 tests per million.
The official added that testing should not be seen in isolation and must be looked at in relation to the positivity rate, which should show a significant drop with the rising number of tests to conclusively prove the efficacy of the containment efforts.
“The ultimate aim is to reduce the positivity rate to under 5%,” he said.
The government figures show that in 30 states/UTs, the positivity rate is lower than the national average of 8.07%. Rajasthan with 2.46% positivity rate and Karnataka with 7.29% positivity rate, represent the lower and the higher end of the group that has done relatively better on that front.
On the front of absolute numbers, the official said it was not helpful to judge a country’s Coved 19 situation by the total number of people infected by the disease.
“The actual load of the disease is 4,02,529 as on July 21. When we talk of statistics, we should not get entangled in historic data. We should focus on active cases since they test our health system’s efficiency,” he said.
The official pointed out that the percentage of active cases has come down from over 90% as on March 24 to less than 40% as on July 21.
The official added that the case fatality rate was another important parameter to judge the success of the country’s containment efforts. In India’s case, the case fatality rate has come down from around 3.36% as on June 17 to 2.43% on July 21.
“Despite the limited resources, if we have been able to contain the case fatality rate to this level, then this speaks volumes about the role played by our health care workers. It also underlines the role played by our institutions of excellence such as All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), that took initiative to advise hospitals and doctors around the country on best practices to bring the fatality rate even further down,” he said.
The official added that the government’s containment decisions were being taken in consultation with domain knowledge experts relying on science-based inputs and that the Centre has been extending all help and support to the states in this fight.
