Punjab Health Minister Balbir Singh Sidhu on Tuesday said the state has become the leading state in the battle against coronavirus by achieving a 78 per cent recovery rate.
He said 1,57,13,789 people have been screened in April and out of them 9,593 were found to have symptoms and referred for further management and sampling.
He said there have been 1,980 confirmed cases in the state and 52,955 persons have been tested out of which 48,813 were found negative. He said out of 1,980 COVID-19 patients, 1,557 cases were cured, the highest recovery rate in India.
Sidhu said the 'Risk Stratified Random Sampling' needs to be done on frequent travellers, frontline workers, people with co-morbidity and people living in densely populated areas, etc, and focus would be on high-risk areas and high-risk individuals to further prevent the spread of the virus.
Till May 18, Punjab has outdone Kerala in doubling rate, the number of days it take for the cases to double. Punjab’s doubling rate went up from 3 days to 91 days in last 13 days. The doubling rate of Kerala is 25 days. Meanwhile, no fresh case has surfaced in seven districts in the last seven days in Punjab. This has brought down the average growth rate 0.6%.
Punjab has also outdone Kerala in the number of tests conducted — 1,693 tests per million against Kerala’s 1,251. Kerala has much lower mortality rate as only three people have succumbed to the virus and 38 people have died after getting infected in Punjab.
The Health Minister said out of 4,218 Nanded returnees, 1,252 turned out to be positive for COVID-19. All of them have been declared cured and sent to their homes.
Meanwhile, doctors and paramedical staff at the Civil Hospital in Ludhiana staged a protest over the poor quality protective equipment being provided to them while on duty.
The protesters raised the provision of poor quality of PPE kits and N-95 masks.
Protester Milan Verma said the masks that were provided were stitched or stapled masks for treating COVID patients and were made of substandard material. Even the PPE kits provided to them were made of poor quality.
The protest was later called off on the assurance by Civil Surgeon Rajesh Bagga that the masks and the other equipment would be replaced