एडवांटेजेस एंड डिसएडवांटेजेस इन कोविड-19 एक्शन टेकन बाय वर्ल्ड हेल्थ ऑर्गेनाइजेशन एंड मिनिस्ट्री ऑफ इंडियन हेल्थ डिपार्मेंट
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New Delhi: Even as the World Health Organisation (WHO) lauded the Indian government for its efforts in tackling COVID-19, the world nodal health agency said that India should also focus on data management originating from the pandemic. According to WHO, India’s big challenge is “population”, its geographic diversity, heterogeneity and the fact that India has multiple epidemics going on every state. WHO appreciated the Indian government’s strong political leadership to focus on important things like developing diagnostics and being able to scale that up, also being very systematic about the lockdown measures and unlocking in an organised manner.
Also Read: Novel Coronavirus Outbreak: “India’s Response And Surveillance Has Been Quite Robust,” Says WHO’s Chief Scientist
This is now the next phase India and many other countries are facing and should think about a long-term strategy, says WHO.
In an exclusive interview with ANI, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at WHO, said,
The Government of India took extremely serious steps from the beginning and put in place certain measures in January itself based on the WHO recommendations. Today, India is doing more than 200 thousand tests a day. Now, India is developing testing kits. It is a big achievement for India that in the last couple of months as India has become self-sufficient in testing kits and being able to scale up.
“However, I would like to say that there should be a focus on data. By that, I mean that we need to have a systematic approach to looking at the data,” added Dr Swaminathan.
She said that the moment people start focusing on the total number of cases and the total number of deaths — it gives only part of the story.
Also Read: Six Months Of Fighting Coronavirus: Pandemic Is Speeding Up, Not Even Close To Being Over, Says WHO Chief
There needs to be some kind of national guidelines on how you report data. Otherwise, you cannot compare. Everybody is reporting things in different ways, she said citing an example that WHO has recommended certain criteria that the government can use to assess where the epidemic is.
She said that the first thing one must know is the epidemiology of the disease, i.e. where and what is the number of cases per million population and it all depends upon the tests.
If we do not test, we are not going to find the case. Reporting of the case alone is not sufficient. We need to know how many tests have been done. Most importantly, we need to know the test positivity rate. This should be under 5 per cent. We also need to know the percentage of positivity of disease surveillance. SARI and ILI surveillance should be under 5 per cent. Then, we need to keep track of the doubling time, Dr Swaminathan stated.