NEW DELHI: The Centre in a meeting with state chief secretaries on Sunday expressed “deep concern” over COVID-19 affected 20 districts in the country. Nine among them are short on the required medical infrastructure to tackle the pandemic crisis.
These 20 districts that include Mumbai, Ahmadabad, Chennai, Central Delhi, Kolkata, North Delhi, Kanpur Nagar, Krishna, Kurnool, Thane, Agra, Indore, Pune, Surat among others, which account for 68 per of active cases and 72 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in India.
A PowerPoint presentation that was shared by the Union health secretary Preeti Sudan with the chief secretaries and accessed by this newspaper also said that 8 of these 20 districts have case doubling rate faster than 10 days and 7 districts have case fatality rate more than the national average of 3.2 per cent.
In terms for testing for coronavirus, Centre is also worried that 7 districts Mumbai, Ahmadabad, Indore, Thane, Agra, Kurnool, Kolkata have confirmation rates twice the national average of 4.4 per cent and Kanpur Nagar is carrying out lesser tests (507 per million) than the India average.
In the meeting, the states were also directed for further aggressive planning for containment areas and have been asked to monitor total and active cases, calculate the doubling rate on a weekly basis, calculate case contact ratio ( total number of contacts/total confirmed cases), calculate testing ratios (total tests conducted per population zone and total tests conducted per total positive cases.)
The Centre also asked states to analyse bed occupancy in terms of number of occupied beds per total number of beds.
The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare also pin pointed key issues like high case doubling rate and high case fatality rate and suggested specific measures to curb them.