PM Modi To Hold Marathon Meet On COVID-19 With Chief Ministers Today, Tomorrow

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold two-day marathon meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday with Chief Ministers over the COVID-19 situation in the country.

In the first round on Tuesday afternoon, the PM will hold video-conferencing with the Chief Ministers and Lieutenant Governors of 21 states and Union Territories.

These include Punjab, Kerala, Goa, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and the North-Eastern states.

The situation in Delhi will be discussed separately on Wednesday along with Odisha, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Karnataka, Gujarat, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

This will be the PM’s sixth round of consultation with the CMs, the last being on May 11, Hindustan Times reported.

The main objective of the meeting, according to officials, is to keep the death rate, or the case fatality rate low. A detailed action plan for this purpose has already been chalked out, they added, and the PM may even raise the issue in his meeting with the chief ministers.

Even as India’s average death rate has remained low at 2.9 — the global average is 5.4% — the concern, the officials said, is that over 80% of the total deaths in the country are from just five states: Maharashtra, Delhi, Gujarat, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.

“We have also noted with concern that 65 districts of India have more than 5% fatality rate. And the largest chunk, 19, of those districts are in Madhya Pradesh, followed by 11 in Gujarat and 10 each in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh,” HT quoted an unnamed official as saying.

Meanwhile, India’s Covid-19 tally crossed 3.3 lakh on Monday and the death toll surpassed 9,500. These include nearly 1.53 active cases, as close to 1.7 lakh have recovered already to give a recovery rate of over 51 per cent, the health ministry said.