Health Secretary Mr Rajesh Bhushan along with Niti Aayog Member (Health) Mr Vinod K Paul chaired a meeting with State Surveillance Officers and concerned officials of Assam, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand.

“Five critical areas of action were discussed for addressing the needs and challenges of recent phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in these States, which has led to an unprecedented surge in number of daily cases and increased mortality,” said the official statement.

Underscoring the importance of human resources in providing health services and clinical management of the severe Covid patients in the hospitals, States were advised to ensure timely payment of performance-linked payments to healthcare workers.

In addition, a slew of decisions taken by the Centre allow the services of final year medical and nursing students, medical interns and those yet to take the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Postgraduate) (NEET-PG), to be utilised for Covid-related healthcare work.

The Health Ministry will also display a real-time list of districts across the country where the positivity rate is above 20 per cent. States are required to undertake focussed efforts in these districts regarding testing, tracing, treating, and enforcing Covid Appropriate Behaviour (CAB) and local containment measures to curb the spread of infection.

During the periods of stringent restricted movement in the States, the time could be utilised for augmentation of hospital infrastructure including construction of makeshift and field hospitals, and attaching hotels to hospitals.

States were advised to follow the advisory enlisting the broad norms of oxygen usage in clinical management of hospitalised patients and reminded to undertake an oxygen audit. The government also plans to set up an oxygen generation plant in every district, and States were advised to identify the sites for installation of the Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) plants.

As part of the liberalised pricing and accelerated COVID-19 vaccination strategy, every month 50 per cent of the Central Drugs Laboratory (CDL)-cleared vaccine doses of every manufacturer are available to States for direct procurement. They were advised to clear the payment of the manufactures so that the vaccine consignments could be delivered in a timely manner.

Of the supply of vaccines, it was recommended that 70 per cent ought to be allocated to meet the requirement of the second dose, while 30 per cent would be for the first dose.