Adequate health facilities to fight coronavirus pandemic: Centre

NEW DELHI: The Centre on Sunday said that it has identified and set up adequate health infrastructure and health facilities for COVID-19 management in the country.

It said the public health facilities dedicated for COVID-19 case management are categorised into three categories - Dedicated COVID Hospital (DCH), Dedicated COVID Health Centre (DCHC) and Dedicated COVID Care Centre (DCCC).

The DCH, that is the first category, offer comprehensive care primarily for those who have been clinically assigned as severe. The second category, i.e. DCHC offer care for all cases that have been clinically assigned as moderate. While the third category that is DCCC, offers care only for cases that have been clinically assigned as mild or very mild cases or COVID suspect cases.

"The DCCC are makeshift facilities which may be set up by the states/UTs in hostels, hotels, schools, stadiums, lodges etc, both public and private. These facilities shall have separate areas for suspected and confirmed cases. Every Dedicated COVID Care Centre is mapped to one or more Dedicated COVID Health Centres and at least one Dedicated COVID Hospital for referral purpose" said the government.

Till today there are 7,740 facilities in 483 districts have been identified in all the states/UTs that include hospitals and facilities of the state/UT governments as well as the central government. There are 6,56,769 isolation beds, 3,05,567 beds for confirmed cases, 3,51,204 beds for suspected cases, 99,492 oxygen supported beds, 1,696 facilities with oxygen manifolds and 34,076 ICU beds.

The Centre has asked all States and UTs to notify and upload the assigned three types of COVID dedicated facilities on their websites for public information. "32 States/UTs have already uploaded the information on their websites/public information platforms and the rest are in the process of doing the same" said the government.

In view of the need for further increasing the testing capacity for COVID-19 at National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), the procurement of a high throughput machine as per the recommendations of Empowered Group 2 was approved. The Cobas 6800 testing machine has been successfully installed at NCDC now. NCDC is providing support for testing of samples from Delhi, NCR, Ladakh, J&K and various other states, as per need.

Presently the testing capacity at NCDC is about 300-350 tests per day. With Cobas 6800, which is a high throughput machine with the capacity to test around 1,200 samples in 24 hours, the testing capacity for COVID-19 at NCDC has been significantly enhanced. "So far, a total of 19,357 people have been cured. In the last 24 hours, 1,511 patients were found cured. This takes the total recovery rate to 30.76 per cent. The total number of confirmed cases is now 62,939. Since yesterday, an increase of 3,277 has been noted in the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases in India," said the government. (IANS)

Also Read: Maharashtra Govt. to pay train tickets for migrants to home states