'Considering the magnitude of population....': WHO praises PM Modi over COVID-19 response

World Health Organisation (WHO) country representative to India, Dr Roderico Ofrin on Thursday praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the country's response to COVID-19 and for making it a Jan Andolan (people's movement)

"The access, affordability and the speed which you get the result of the test, communicating and engaging with the community to be able to do COVID-19 appropriate behaviours-- it was all on the call of Prime Minister, the Jan Andolan," Ofrin said while speaking with ANI.

The WHO country's representative also said that the Government of India should be proud of the resilience shown during the pandemic.

"Considering the magnitude of the population, 1.3 billion, 37 states and UTs, 770 districts and multiply the key public health actions into that, for that government of India has to be very proud of," he added.

Speaking on the vaccination drive across the country, he said, "Bringing diligence and disciplined response to vaccination is another area of responsibility. We see that it has been successful as six million have been vaccinated and it is the fastest rate of vaccination happening."

India recently became the fastest country to vaccinate six million beneficiaries against COVID-19, the union health ministry said on Monday. While USA took 26 days to reach this mark, the UK took 46 days, India achieved the feat in the fastest 24 days.

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Ofrin lauds Gujarat goverment for response to second wave

Ofrin also praised the Gujarat state government for its efforts in countering the second wave of the Coronavirus with the help of Intra-Action Review (IAR) mechanism. The state government had conducted the Intra-Action Review in December 2020 for its COVID-19 preparedness and response.

"Hats off to Gujarat government to take this review on pandemic as something to provide better information and tweak the response which they have especially during the second wave. Gujarat is one of the best performing states in vaccinations. It would be great if other states also start doing the same review exercise of their response," Ofrin said while speaking with ANI.

Talking about the various initiatives of Gujarat Government, Ofrin lauded the house-to-house surveillance conducted by the government for better contact tracing.

"In Gujarat, there was house to house surveillance for better contact tracing that was key to find out the extent of how the infection is spreading. Second is the outreach of the medical services to provide medicine to people because of the lockdown access to health services needed to continue," he said while also lauding the government's initiative to address mental health amid the pandemic.

Speaking about the IAR he said, "This report is called Intra-action for COVID-19 response for countries to be able to review for what they have done and they can tweet the responses to the pandemic. This is a longer outbreak than we expected. Usually, for any emergency, we do an after-action review so the state and ministry of health together with WHO, IIM Ahmedabad and Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar got together including all stakeholders with 75 interviews and 35 organisations."

The review documents the challenges that the stakeholders faced while dealing with the outbreak and recommends critical improvements required to ramp up the health response. The entire IAR process was planned and implemented in three phases given that India is a large country with a complex federal structure.

(With ANI inputs)

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