COVID Surge: This Odisha District Among Top 20 Active Case Contributors In Country

New Delhi: Ganjam in Odisha is among the districts and metropolises that are the top 20 contributors of active COVID-19 cases in the country, the Centre said on Saturday.

The others are Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi, Nagpur, Mumbai, Ernakulam, Lucknow, Kozhikode, Thane, Nashik, Malappuram, Thrissur, Jaipur, Gurgaon, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Chandrapur, Kolkata and Palakkad.

The Director of National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr Sujeet Kumar Singh, informed this at a virtual meeting of the Group of Ministers (GOM) on COVID-19. The meeting was chaired by the Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Dr Harsh Vardhan.

Singh further informed that several states had registered high 7-day growth rate in cases. These included Maharashtra (1.27%), Karnataka (3.05%), Kerala (2.35%), Uttar Pradesh (2.44%), Tamil Nadu (1.86%), Delhi (1.92%), Andhra Pradesh (1.90%), West Bengal (2.19%), Chhattisgarh (2.06%), Rajasthan (2.99%), Gujarat (2.40%) and Madhya Pradesh (2.24%).

According to the NCDC director, emphasis should be on timely provision of clinical care in high transmission areas to reduce morbidity and mortality.

He also highlighted other steps including advance preparedness in anticipation of rise in cases, increase in testing using RAT and tracing of those who might have contracted the infection, emphasis on clinic-epidemiological linkage of genomic surveillance with transmission dynamics, clinical severity and age profile of new cases.