Press Trust of India

Covid-19: Focus on reducing mortality rate among critically ill patients: Union Home Secy to JK

Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size Text Size Print This Page

Srinagar: Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla on Tuesday directed authorities in Jammu and Kashmir to focus on reducing the mortality rate among the critically ill COVID-19 patients in the Union territory.
Bhalla, while reviewing the COVID death audit report for Jammu and Kashmir at a meeting through video conference, observed that most of the critical patients die within 72 hours of hospitalization.
“He emphasized on the need to tackle the issue,” an official spokesman said after the meeting.
Bhalla chaired a high level meeting to review the management of COVID-19 pandemic in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
Chief Secretary B V R Subrahmanyam and other top officials of the health and medical education departments were present in the meeting.
The Home secretary was informed that J&K is performing reasonably well in mitigating COVID-19 pandemic with 53,323 tests per million population, 1746 cases per million population, doubling rate of 27.2 days, 3.3 per cent positivity rate, 61.3 per cent recovery rate, and 1.8 per cent mortality rate.
On testing capacities, the chief secretary said the related infrastructure has been ramped up and against the WHO recommendation of 140 tests per million population per day, the UT is now conducting 900 tests per million per day.
For this, five additional testing laboratories, four CBNAAT (Cartridge-Based Nucleic Acid Amplification Test) facilities and 15 TRUENAT laboratories were established in government medical institutions, besides, augmenting the RTPCR tests with Rapid Antigen Tests.
Further, the government is also in the process of procuring three COBAS-6800 fully automated systems to enhance per day testing capacity, which is currently at 12,000 tests per day, the spokesperson said.
While sharing the data on surge of bilateral pneumonia cases in the valley, the chief secretary sought help of the Union government through a technical team of experts for analysing such cases and advising on probable containment of its spread.
Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday recorded 390 COVID-19 cases, taking the total number of infections to 22,396, while 10 fatalities in the last 24 hours pushed the death toll from the disease to 417, officials said. (PTI)


Press Trust of India

Press Trust of India is lead news agency of India

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *