India rapidly creating Covid dedicated infrastructure: MoS Health

New Delhi, Sep 7 (IANS) Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Bharati Pravin Pawar, said on Tuesday that with a decentralised but unified government approach, India is focused on rapidly creating Covid dedicated infrastructure and upskilling of the healthcare workforce.

Pawar was representing India at the World Health Organization-Southeast Asia Regional Office (WHO-SEARO) through video-conference on Tuesday. She offered intervention on behalf of India at the ministerial roundtable for the 74th session of the WHO regional committee for Southeast Asia.

She highlighted the key measures and strategies planned to ‘build back better' to achieve universal healthcare and health related sustainable development goals and to strengthen health system resilience for the future.

Acknowledging that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected virtually every sphere of life apart from causing huge loss of lives, she said, "Guided by the Prime Minister, the country adopted a proactive, pre-emptive, whole of government, whole of society and people-centric approach to manage the pandemic."

"Our preparedness and response strategies utilized our past experiences of managing public health emergencies and contemporary scientific knowledge about the evolving nature of disease to decide requisite public health interventions," she added.

The MoS mentioned that India's strategy for fighting the pandemic is built on five pillars -- test, track, treat, vaccinate and adherence to Covid appropriate behaviour.

"With a decentralised but unified, whole of government approach, we focused on rapidly creating Covid dedicated infrastructure and upskilling of our healthcare workforce," she said.

Speaking on the human cost of the pandemic, she said, "Realising the indirect impact of Covid-19, especially on the poor and marginalised sections of the society, a number of social security measures, including supply of food grains, minimum income support schemes, support for small industries, support for children who have lost their parents due to Covid-19 and other economic measures were taken to mitigate the impact of the pandemic."