SRINAGAR, DECEMBER 21 (KNS): Secretary, Health and Medical Education, Bhupinder Kumar, today convened a meeting to review the COVID-19 situation besides assessing department’s preparedness for early detection, isolation, testing and timely management of suspected and confirmed cases to contain outbreak of Corona variants, in the wake of alert issued by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

The meeting was attended by all Head of Departments of Health and Medical Education Department besides other concerned.

Secretary, while discussing strategies to tackle the pandemic, emphasized the need of ensuring a strict vigil over the situation besides keeping ready the infrastructure and requisite supplies to tackle with any such cases.

Secretary reviewed in detail the available infrastructure, machinery and equipments including the status of testing capacity, availability of COVID essential diagnostics, COVID drugs and Oxygen Generation Plants.

Secretary instructed the Principal Government Medical College Jammu and Government Medical College Srinagar to ensure genome sequencing machines are installed and operationalized immediately in both the Medical Colleges to perform genome sequencing of all COVID positive cases.

He also asked the Managing Director, JKMSCL, to ensure that the COVID drugs and diagnostics are arranged in adequate quantities. He directed the HoDs of Health and Medical Education Department to make assessment of their requirements immediately and sent the requisition for procurement to JKMSCL.(KNS)