Ramp up Covid testing, hospital infrastructure: Centre

Centre on Tuesday asked union territories to ramp up testing and beef up hospital infrastructure even as the national capital gasped for oxygen with hospitals reporting scarce supplies.

The directions came at a review meeting Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla and Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan held with chief secretaries of union territories.

The meeting came on a day when Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal raised concerns over severe shortage of oxygen in the national capital with the government saying that several hospitals have supplies that could barely last a few hours.

An official statement said, the Union Home Secretary asked the UT officers to maintain constant vigil against the grave situation in union territories and increase RT-PCR tests in addition to rapid antigen tests.

Bhalla also asked the UTs to prepare for the next three weeks keeping view of the critical situation of the pandemic.

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The union territories of Ladakh, J&K and Lakshadweep said the surge in new cases was due to increase in in-bound travellers,

Bhalla asked the officials from Delhi to undertake a survey to identify Covid-19 positive persons.

In the last 11 days, new cases have almost doubled from 1.31 lakh reported on April 9 to 2.73 lakh on April 20.

India on Tuesday reported more than 2.5 lakh Covid-19 cases in the 24 hours ending at 8:00 a.m. with 10 states including Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, accounting for 77.67% of the new Covid-19 infections.

The daily Covid-19 positivity rate (seven-day moving average) continued to show an upward trend and was currently at 15.99%, the Health Ministry said.

Karnataka, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Rajasthan are the other states in the list of 10.

Maharashtra has reported the highest daily new cases at 58,924, followed by Uttar Pradesh (28,211) and Delhi (23,686).

India's total active caseload has reached 20,31,977 and now comprises 13.26% of the country's total infections.

As many as 1,761 deaths were reported in the 24 hours ending 8:00 a.m. Tuesday with Maharashtra accounting for maximum casualties (351) followed by Delhi (240).