Covid review: Health Minister to meet with heads of 9 states today

Union Minister for Health Mansukh Mandaviya will be meeting with the heads of 9 states and Union Territories today in order to review the prevailing Covid-19 situation. The states which are involved in the meeting are the UT of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Ladakh, Uttar Pradesh and Chandigarh.

The virtual meeting is aimed at public health preparedness as well as strategies for containing the pandemic, especially in view of the exploding number of cases driven by the highly-transmissible Omicron variant of the virus.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi too reviewed the pandemic situation in the country earlier this month where he directed officials to ensure adequate healthcare infrastructure at the district level and accelerate the vaccination drive for adolescents in mission mode.

The Prime Minister also said that intensive containment and active surveillance should continue in clusters reporting higher cases and required technical support be provided to states which are reporting higher cases.

The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genome Sequencing Consortium (INSACOG) declared in its bulletin yesterday that the new strain had become the dominant one in metros, pushing out the more severe Delta strain and causing increased numbers of infections and hospital admissions. Omicron was in "community transmission" stage, INSACOG said.

Most cases of the Omicron variant have been mild, the advisory group said, although hospitalisations and cases in intensive care were increasing. Predictive modelling has put the peak of the pandemic in February after which it is expected to slow down.

Meanwhile, India reported 3,06,064 new Covid-19 cases on Monday, nearly 28,000 less than the day before. The Union health ministry said that the positivity rate in the country has reached 20 %. The ministry also said that India's active caseload stands at 22,49,335 and accounts for 5.69 % of the total cases.