MHA to review COVID-19 situation in Northeastern states amid surge in positivity rate

Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla will discuss the COVID-19 situation with officials from Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, and Manipur.

Moneycontrol News
July 07, 2021 / 11:04 AM IST

This comes days after the Centre rushed multi-disciplinary teams to six states, including Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Tripura.

Amid a spike in COVID-19 positivity rates in the northeast region, the Union Home Ministry is set to hold a review meeting of the Northeastern states and a few Union Territories on July 7 to discuss the coronavirus situation.

Union Home Secretary, Ajay Bhalla, will chair the high-level meeting, which will be attended by NITI Aayog member Dr VK Paul, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, ICMR DG Dr Balram Bhargava among others.

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Bhalla will discuss the COVID-19 situation with officials from Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, and Manipur, as per a Hindustan Times report.

This comes days after the Centre rushed multi-disciplinary teams to six states, including Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Tripura.

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The teams are expected to take stock of the overall implementation of COVID-19 management, especially in testing, surveillance and containment operations, COVID-appropriate behaviour and its enforcement, availability of hospital beds, sufficient logistics including ambulances, ventilators, medical oxygen and the vaccination progress.

The teams will monitor the situation and also suggest remedial actions, a Health Ministry statement said.

Meanwhile, the Union Health Ministry on July 6 said that around 73 districts across 17 states and union territories reported more than 10 percent COVID-19 positivity rate in the week from June 29 to July 5.

Eight out of the 17 states and UTs are from the northeastern part of the country, according to the data presented by the ministry.

Addressing a press conference, Joint Secretary in the health ministry Lav Agarwal said these 73 districts include Arunachal Pradesh (18), Rajasthan (10), Manipur (9), Kerala (7), Meghalaya (6), Tripura (4), Sikkim (4), Odisha (3), Nagaland (3), Assam (2) and Mizoram (1).

These districts reported a more than 10 percent COVID-19 positivity rate in the week from June 29 to July 5, he said.

On the rise in Covid cases in the northeast, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Director-General Balram Bhargava said, "We are encouraging the northeast states to do more testing and increase their reporting of testing because the problem there is that heavy testing is going on there so we have to ensure that testing continues in a rapid scale there."

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Tags: #coronavirus #Current Affairs #India #MHA
first published: Jul 7, 2021 11:04 am