Home Secy Ajay Bhalla chairs high-level meeting to discuss COVID-19 response strategy

New Delhi [India], April 20 (ANI): Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla, along with Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan chaired a high-level meeting on Tuesday to review and discuss the response strategy and management of COVID-19.
The meeting was held via video conferencing and attended by Dr V K Paul, Member (Health) NITI Aayog, Dr Balram Bhargava, Secretary, DHR and DG ICMR, the chief secretaries and DGPs of all the Union Territories of India.
The Home Secretary pointed out the steep growth in the number of cases all across the country.
"From 20,000 cases reported on January 1, 2021, India has almost 10 times more cases (more than 2,00,000 cases) being reported daily since April 15, 2021. In the last 11 days, new cases have almost doubled from 1.31 lakh reported on April 9 to 2.73 lakh reported on April 20," read the release.
The UTs shared their present efforts for containment and management of the positive cases. Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir and Lakshadweep pointed to the rise in cases due to a large number of inbound travellers.
The Chandigarh administration informed about the door-to-door counselling for increasing vaccination. 90 per cent of the patients in the UT are in home isolation who are being monitored by mobile teams.
Union Territory of Delhi discussed the shortage of beds and the present efforts to augment this through central government infrastructure and support through the DRDO's newly operationalised COVID Hospital, read the release.
Dr V K Paul pointed out the criticality of the next three weeks for COVID response measures. The UT administrators were advised to plan in advance for three weeks.
Meanwhile, India reported 2,59,170 new COVID-19 infections and 1,761 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry said on Tuesday. This has taken the total number of positive cases in the country to 1,53,21,089.
There are currently 20,31,977 active cases in the country as of Tuesday.

As many as 1,54,761 people recovered from the virus. With this, the total number of recoveries reached 1,31,08,582 in India. The death toll has reached 1,80,530 with additional 1,761 fatalities. (ANI)