India extra prepared to tackle rising number of coronavirus cases

New Delhi: The Union government on Sunday allayed concerns over nation's preparedness to tackle rising number of coronavirus cases and said the government has always been on top of the challenge by using the mantra of "extra-preparedness".

Union Health Ministry's joint secretary Lav Agarwal presented data to indicate that the country has been sufficiently scaling up its capacity in areas of testing, training and hospitalization to stay ahead of the curve of the disease.

"As of today, if we need 1,671 beds for Covid-19 patients, but we have over 1 lakh 5 thousand beds available," said Agarwal.

"We are increasing Covid-19 hospitals and isolation beds, this pandemic can result into an exponential rise in cases, which is why we are preparing in advance. Continuous training of medical professionals to manage Covid-19 cases has been done at the national and the state level. We are extra-prepared," he added.

An ICMR representative present at the daily joint briefing added that the government's testing capacity had steadily increased to 219 labs including 68 from the private sector.

He added that the average number of tests per day for the past five days has consistently been over the figure of 15,000. "A total of 1,86,906 samples have been tested so far, of which 7,953 were found to be positive for Covid-19," said the official.