India Doing ”Pretty Well” In Fight Against COVID-19: NITI Aayog Member

New Delhi: India is doing “pretty well” in its fight against the COVID-19 and will “win this war”, the Centre said on Thursday, asserting that though the country adopted the same principles that China did to contain coronavirus spread, its experience was different as the disease came through travel and affected multiple points.

At a media briefing, Chairman of Empowered Group One and NITI Aayog member Dr VK Paul said China was the first one to experience the COVID-19 outbreak and it was localised in one particular province, later expanding to few other cities.

Asked what India did not do and China did right in restricting the number of cases, Mr Paul said the principles that China adopted were exactly the same that India had adopted in terms of containment, social distancing and other non pharmacological measures.

“But, remember once the disease went out of China, the entire world was to face this pandemic in a very different way because it came through travel, it came to multiple points in every nation including ours,” Mr Paul said.

“It does take a while for the whole process to be mobilized and it got seeded in a large population across the world. But the principles are essentially the same – that is discipline on the part of the people, strategy of containment which we have been highlighting, which is at the core of our approach and because of which we do have a limited disease, in a limited number of cities and limited number of containment zones,” he said.

The principles that the world is following is based on the experience gained in SARS and MERS epidemics, he said.

“I don’t think the approach is different, all nations are grappling with balancing priorities of maintaining reasonable life balance with how much suppression you can ensure on the spread of the disease and I think India is doing pretty well,” Mr Paul said.

Virus has the nature of travelling very rapidly and it catches every susceptible person if it can, but India will not allow the will of the virus to run across this country, he asserted.

“The nation has demonstrated that this can be contained, this can be lessened, this can be suppressed and together the nation will win this war,” Mr Paul asserted.