15 districts across 5 states exhibiting high COVID-19 caseload and fatality, Centre directs to bring mortality below 1 pc

The Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan on Friday directed the authorities in 15 districts of five states-- Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh to proactively curb the chain of coronavirus transmission and bring mortality below 1 percent.

These 15 districts comprise of Chittoor, Prakasam, Mysuru, Bengaluru Urban, Ballari, Koppal, Dakshina Kannada, Davangere, Ludhiana, Patiala, Chennai, Coimbatore, Salem, Lucknow and Kanpur Nagar.

Bhushan held a review meeting through video conference (VC) with the Health Secretaries of 15 districts across the five states as these areas are exhibiting higher active caseload, fatality rates and a surge in the COVID cases for the past four weeks.

"The Union Secretary shared the overall status and performance of the districts on the key parameters of testing, positivity, case fatality etc., focusing on the need of continuing containment measures, increasing testing, effective clinical management of patients," stated government release.

Bhushan advised States and districts to limit and break the spread of the infection by implementing stringent containment measures and following social distancing measures, strict perimeter control, and active house-to-house case search.

He asked the state government to do early identification by ramping up testing across the districts, optional utilization of RT-PCR testing capacity and use of Rapid Antigen Tests as a screening test in hotspots and densely populated areas.

"Effective monitoring of home isolation cases and early hospitalization in case of disease progression should be done especially in cases of the co-morbid and elderly population," the release read.

Hospitals have to follow effective infection control measures to safeguard healthcare workers from contracting the infection while district collectors have to prepare and update district-specific plans to continue their efforts to manage the pandemic with the same rigour, said the government official.

State Health Secretaries provided an in-depth analysis on the current status of COVID-19 in these 15 districts covering aspects of containment measures, contact tracing, surveillance activities, facility-wise case fatality rates, trends in terms of weekly new cases and deaths, etc. and shared their detailed roadmaps and action plans for the next one month.

Granularities in terms of split of RT-PCR and Rapid Antigen tests conducted in the district, re-testing percentage of symptomatic negatives from Antigen tests, testing lab utilization, home isolation status, hospitalization status and bed occupancies of oxygen-supported beds, ICU beds and ventilator etc., were also shared with the Centre.

( With inputs from ANI )