Out of total COVID-19 cases in India, under 2% in ICU
May 15, 2020
By Priyanka Sharma
New Delhi [India], May 15 : A total of 1,559 COVID-19 patients are in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) across the country as of Friday afternoon out of the total confirmed cases in the country.
India's COVID-19 count reached 81,970 including 51,401 active cases and 2,649 deaths. 27,919 patients have been cured/discharged so far.
"Of the total cases, 1,347 patients have been put on oxygen support as on date while 225 are on ventilator, sources in the Health Ministry told ANI.
In the last 24 hours, a total of 358 new cases were admitted in ICU and 89 on the ventilator. However, 488 total new cases are on oxygen support.
About 3.07 percentage of active cases are in the ICU till today while 0.44 per cent of active cases are on ventilator and 2.65 percentage of active cases are on oxygen support.
On Friday, 15th meeting of the high-level Group of Ministers (GoM) on COVID-19 was held at the union health ministry under the chairmanship of Dr Harsh Vardhan.
GoM discussed the strategies for COVID-19 management and containments protocols for states with the highest number of confirmed cases and the highest number of fatalities.
It also discussed the challenges before various States/UTs arising from the returning migrant labourers and the returnees from abroad.
According to the health ministry, a total of 8,694 facilities comprising of 919 dedicated COVID hospitals, 2,036 COVID health centres and 5,739 COVID care centres with a total of 2,77,429 beds for severe and critical cases, 29,701 ICU beds and 5,15,250 isolation beds in care centres, are available.
Also, as on date, 18,855 ventilators are now available to combat COVID-19 in the country. In addition, manufacturing of ventilators by domestic manufacturers has also started and orders have been placed.
The Centre has also provided 84.22 lakh N95 masks and 47.98 lakh Personal Protective Equipments (PPEs) to the States/ UTs / Central institutions. GoM was also informed that domestic manufacturers have reached the production capacity of nearly 3 lakh PPEs per day and about 3 lakh N-95 masks per day.
As per the government, the testing capacity has increased in the country to 1,00,000 tests per day. About 20 lakh cumulative tests have been conducted in the country, as on date.
Recently, the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) had been equipped with the COBAS 6800, a fully automated, high-end machine for performing real-time PCR testing COVID-19 in the service of the nation.
COBAS 6800 will provide quality, high-volume testing with a high throughput of test around 1200 samples in 24 hours.
