NEW DELHI: The Centre on Monday said that the battle against pandemic was still far from over and told the Parliament about its balanced approach of unlocking to revive the economy while seeking for sustained community support to break the chain of transmission of Covid-19.
Making a suo-moto statement on Covid-19 situation, Union health minister Harsh Vardhan said a total of about 40 lakh persons had been kept under surveillance as on September 11 to break the chain of transmission.
Calling the lockdown, a “bold decision”, he said the decision prevented approximately 14-29 lakh cases and 37-78 thousand deaths.
On the vaccine front, the minister informed the members that there are around 145 candidate vaccines globally in pre-clinical evaluation while 35 vaccines are currently in clinical trial.
“In India, a major focus has been on facilitating the development of Covid-19 vaccine. More than 30 vaccine candidates have been supported which are in different stages of development, three candidates are in advanced stage of Phase I/II/III trials and more than four are in advanced preclinical development stage,” he said.
It was the health minister’s third statement on the Covid-19 situation with the first two being delivered in February and March, respectively. Speaking about the current situation, Vardhan said, “We have now moved from ‘managing travel related cases’ to containing clusters and large outbreaks due to local transmission to wide spread of infection to urban, peri-urban and rural areas.”
On the ongoing efforts, Vardhan said the government was proactively identifying gaps and building an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (self-reliant India) that would be able to take challenges of similar pandemics, epidemics and disasters in future.
He said an expenditure finance memorandum of over Rs 65,560 crores under Prime Minister ‘Atma Nirbhar Swasth Bharat Yojana’ was under consideration. “This includes investment in research, healthcare and public health infrastructure with particular focus on pandemic management,” said Vardhan.
On the spread of the pandemic, he said, “As per WHO, there are more than 2.79 crore confirmed cases across the world with more than 9.05 lakh deaths, with a case fatality rate of 3.2%. As on September 11, a total of 45,62,414 confirmed cases and 76,271 deaths (Case Fatality Rate 1.67%) have been reported in India.”
The minister informed the members that the maximum cases and deaths have been primarily reported from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal, Bihar, Telangana, Odisha, Assam, Kerala and Gujarat. All these states have reported more than one lakh cases.
“With our endeavour to manage Covid-19 through a whole of government and whole of society approach, India has been able to limit its cases and deaths per million to 3,328 cases per million and 55 deaths per million population respectively, which is one of the lowest in the world as compared to similarly affected countries,” claimed the minister.