New Delhi (Yogesh Bhardwaj): Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare participated in a virtual meeting hosted by the Lead India Foundation as their Chief Guest. The event was on the impact of COVID19 on the global economy.
Dr. Harsh Vardhan late last night, while welcoming everyone on the occasion said, “Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we have used the crisis as an opportunity to move ahead. While a pandemic is not an event worth remembering, the event has forced to relook at ourselves and has forced us to adapt to changing circumstances. People have also started looking at nature differently.” He dwelt upon how the country’s preparation helped it to contain COVID-19 and prove critics wrong, “Within 24 hours after China drawing the attention of the world community to the COVID crisis, the Government had formed committees of technical experts to review the situation. Detailed advisories to tackle the situation were issued within the week.”
Speaking of his duty as the Chair of the Group of Ministers constituted on 30th January, he recalled how “the country went from just one lab equipped to test for the novel virus in National Institute of Virology, Pune to about 1250 labs as of now. The country tests an average 3.3 lakhs COVID suspects everyday and will amplify the capacity to test one million people within the next 12 weeks.” “Around 1400 dedicated COVID hospitals, 3000 dedicated health centres and 10,000 care centres with around 46,000 ICU beds have played a phenomenal role in improving the recovery rate to 63.33%, one of the world’s highest and reducing the mortality rate to 2.55%, one of the world’s lowest”, he added.
He also spoke about the innovation COVID-19 has helped unearth in the Science Community, “Our scientists are working day and night to discover new drugs and repurpose old ones. Vaccine development has also been fast tracked.”
He then expanded on the economic reforms being initiated under the leadership of Prime Minister Narenda Modi, “A land bank double the size of Luxemborg, labour reforms that unleashes the demographic dividend of India have all made India attractive to multiple MNCs and foreign investors”
He ended the talk by reminding everyone of India’s age old wisdom of seeing the Earth as a global village that would help the global economy grow with respect to the economic reforms being enacted here.