By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, APR 20, 2020: ADDRESSING the G20 Health Ministers' Summit on COVID-19 yesterday, the Indian Health Minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, urged for cooperation and mutually respectful and useful collaborations. The 19-member countries of G20 are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America and India.

“I congratulate you all for managing and keeping the situation under control in our fight against COVID-19 in your respective Countries”, said Dr. Harsh Vardhan during the meeting. He said the “Global health crisis witnessed by the world today, creates an opportunity to dive deep into the nature of what connects us all, while at the same time providing us with the collective strength and wisdom to accomplish.” Mentioning about successful collective global efforts in the past, he said, “In the past, we as a global community have faced and successfully tackled threats to health of our people, by a collective sense of purpose, support and collaborating with each other. I look forward to similar cooperation and mutually respectful & useful collaborations to deal with Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).While some of the countries particularly Japan, Singapore, South Korea have fared well, others are still struggling with COVID-19. The scale of impact is unprecedented and therefore calls for cooperation between nations to attain normalcy.”

Talking about the present scenario of COVID in the country, he said, “As of today, the 19th of April, we have completed 25 days of lockdown which will further extend till the 3rd of May. The results of the same were realized when our case doubling rate which was about 3.4 days on the 17th of March, dropped to 4.4 days by the 25th of March, and is currently about 7.2 days.”

Highlighting India’s approach in combating COVID-19, he said, “This time the hallmark of our approach has been fivefold: (i) Maintaining a continuous situation awareness, (ii) Pre-emptive and proactive approach, (iii) Graded response as per continuously evolving scenario, (iv) Inter-sectoral coordination at all levels, and lastly, but most importantly (v) Creating a people’s movement to combat this disease.”

Elucidating the strategy further, Dr Vardhan said, “India has made the conscious decision to focus on building exclusive infrastructure for management of COVID patients so that there is no intermingling of COVID patients. All the people who are tested positive are treated in one of three types of dedicated COVID management Centres: COVID Care Centres(CCCs) for mild symptomatic cases, COVID Health Centres(CHCs) for moderate cases and COVID Hospitals (CHs) for severe cases. These dedicated COVID facilities are mapped to each other in the design of a referral network architecture for dynamic movement of patients as symptoms evolve, so that optimal clinical care can be provided timely, commensurate to symptoms.”