As India witnesses an uptick in COVID cases, a two-day nationwide drill is being carried out from Monday onward to review the preparedness of both state-run and private hospitals.
On Monday, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya visited the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) hospital in Jhajjar District of Haryana state to oversee the drill.
The top official, last week, held a review meeting on 7 April, where he asked the state health ministers to visit hospitals and oversee the drills.
During the meeting, the ministers said that irrespective of the new variants, the five-fold strategy of “Test-Track-Treat-Vaccinate and adherence to COVID-Appropriate Behavior” remains the tested strategy for COVID management.
The minister emphasized the need to pinpoint emergency hotspots by monitoring trends of influenza-like illness (ILI) and severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) cases, ramping up testing and vaccination, and ensuring the readiness of the country's hospital infrastructure.
He also stressed on the need to create public awareness about COVID-appropriate behavior, besides enhancing genome sequencing and ramping up the whole genome sequencing of positive samples.
The states and union territories were also informed that currently the World Health Organization (WHO) is closely tracking a variant of interest (VOI), XBB.1.5, and six other variants are under monitoring (BQ.1, BA.2.75, CH.1.1, XBB, XBF and XBB.1.16).
Notably, several states and union territories have made masks compulsory in public places as cases have surged over the past few weeks.