Most of the people infected with coronavirus in India are displaying mild or very mild symptoms of the disease, the Union Health Ministry said at its daily press briefing on Wednesday, as it reassured the public that the decision to categorise health care facilities into three classes would go a long way in ramping up the “field infrastructure” to deal with such patients.
There are dedicated COVID-19 Care Centres to treat people with mild or very mild symptoms. The central and state authorities are already enlisting the help of hotels, hostels and other facilities, which could be expanded to include other establishments. The focus is to bolster the field infrastructure, Luv Agarwal, the joint secretary at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, said.
He said that the overall case count of infected patients stood at 5,194, which included 149 fatalities. He added that 149 patients had walked out healthy from the hospital after having contracted the infection.
Agarwal highlighted that the central government, in collaboration with different state governments, was aggressively implementing the ‘containment plan’ to check for new cases and further spread of the virus among the populace.
Addressing the reporters after Agarwal, Union Home Ministry spokesperson Punya Salil Srivastava said that the lockdown measures were being increased in states across the country. “The help of community leaders is being sought to implement the lockdown. The social distancing measures are being encouraged through technologies such as area mapping,” she said.
Srivastava reiterated that the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana had made an allocation of Rs 1.7 lakh crore for workers in the informal sector, out of which Rs 31,000 crore had been kept aside for construction labourers.