NEW DELHI: The Centre on Friday underlined that there are 30 municipal areas with nearly 80 per cent of India’s COVID-19 cases and asked states to focus on reducing the fatality rates.
The Union ministry of health and family welfare has also asked states to ensure timely detection of infection and carry out the contact tracing exercise diligently.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country now stands at 81,970 with 2,649 deaths and the fatality rate is pegged at 3.23 per cent.
So far, a total of 27,920 people have been cured, of whom 1,685 patients have been declared as “recovered” in the last 24 hours. In this period, 100 new deaths have been reported too.
In a meeting of the group of ministers on the COVID-19 outbreak management in the country, it was discussed that the health ministry has already shared recommendations with the states on zone management, root causes of the spread and action required.
The government, in letters written to states earlier this month, had said there are 20 districts contributing 68 per cent of the total case loads and 72 per cent of total infection related mortalities in the country.
The ministry said that as of now, a total of 8,694 dedicated COVID-19 facilities comprising 919 hospitals, 2,036 health centres and 5,739 care centres with a total of 2,77,429 beds for severe and critical cases, 29,701 ICU beds and 5,15,250 isolation beds in care centres are available.
There are 18,855 ventilators available to provide critical care support to those who are severely sick due to the infection.
The Centre also said it has provided 84.22 lakh N95 masks and 47.98 lakh Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) to states and central institutions.
It has assessed that domestic manufacturers have reached the production capacity of nearly 3 lakh PPEs per day and about 3 lakh N-95 masks per day which may be sufficient to meet the requirement of the country in the near future.
In addition, manufacturing of ventilators by domestic manufacturers has also started and orders have been placed.