Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has decided to deploy high level Central teams to four States of Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha. These States are seeing a sudden surge in the number of COVID cases and some of them are also reporting high mortality.  

The teams will support the State efforts towards strengthening containment, surveillance, testing and efficient clinical management of the positive cases. They shall also guide the States in effectively managing the challenges related to timely diagnosis and follow up.

Each of the multi-sectoral teams will comprise of an epidemiologist and a public health expert.

Of these four States, Uttar Pradesh has the maximum number of active cases pegged at 54,666, followed by Odisha (27,219), Chhattisgarh (13,520) and Jharkhand which has 11,577 active cases. In terms of total/cumulative cases till date, Uttar Pradesh has 2,25,632, Odisha (1,00,934), Jharkhand (38,435) and Chhattisgarh has 30,092 cases. The most number of deaths are reported in Uttar Pradesh (3423) while Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are reporting 482, 410 and 269 deaths cumulatively.

As an ongoing effort, the Central Government has been deputing Central teams from time to time to visit various States to interact with the authorities and get a first hand understanding of the challenges and issues being faced by them so as to strengthen their ongoing activities and remove bottlenecks, if any.  

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MV

HFW/COVID Central Teams/31Aug2020/3