The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Wednesday allowed the movement of migrant workers, tourists, students and others stranded at various places because of lockdown.
According to ministry guidelines, all persons to be medically screened at source and destination; and should be kept in home/institutional quarantine on arrival.
The order from the home ministry asked state governments to appoint nodal officers to facilitate inter-state movement of stranded.
“The moving person(s) would be screened and those found asymptomatic would be allowed to proceed,” according to the order.
The novel coronavirus cases in India has risen to 31,787, with 1008 fatalities. There are 22,982 active cases while 7,796 have been cured/discharged, according to Health Ministry website.
Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday stated, “since the last three days, the doubling rate is 11.3 days in the country. Although global mortality rate is around 7%, India is having a mortality rate of around 3%, and around 86% of fatality of persons with co-morbidity.”
He also added that only 0.33% patients are on ventilators, 1.5% patients are on oxygen support and 2.34% patients are in ICU, which reflects the quality of care being provided across the country. In case of any further eventuality, the country is well equipped with isolation beds, ventilators, PPE, masks etc., he stated.
He also informed that 288 government laboratories are working along with 97 private labs with around 16,000 sample collection centres and testing around 60,000 tests per day. Government is working to increase the testing capacity to 1 lakh tests per day within next few days, he added.
The Health Minister further said that since the development of a vaccine is going to take a longer time, Lockdown and Social Distancing are serving as effective ‘social vaccine’. “The Ministry of Science & Technology, under my charge, has also been working on innovations and have been funding certain projects which are going to make the testing procedure quite fast”, he said.
