<span style="color: black;">Union Home Secretary, Ajay Kumar Bhalla, today chaired a high level meeting to review the management of COVID-19 pandemic in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">Union Home Secretary while reviewing the COVID death audit report observed that most of the critical patients die within 72 hours of hospitalization. He emphasized on the need to tackle the issue.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">Regarding testing capacities, Chief Secretary said that the related infrastructure has been ramped up and against the WHO recommendation of 140 tests per million population per day, J&K is now conducting 900 tests per million per day.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">For this, 5 additional testing laboratories, 4 CBNAAT facilities and 15 TRUENAT laboratories were established in government medical institutions, besides, augmenting the RTPCR tests with Rapid Antigen Tests.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">Further, the Government is also in the process of procuring 3 COBAS 6800 fully automated systems to enhance per day testing capacity, which is currently at 12,000 tests per day.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">Chief Secretary further informed that the Government has recently revised home quarantine guidelines to permit such isolation in favour of asymptomatic patients with no co-morbidity. Arogya Setu app should be downloaded for better monitoring.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">These patients are being provided with Government sponsored oxymeters with the instruction of reporting to hospitals if their oxygen saturation level dips below 90 per cent.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">Chief Secretary said that this will reduce the burden on healthcare institutions and will pave way to better monitoring of critical cases.</span><br />'' <span style="color: black;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: black;">While sharing the data on surge of bilateral pneumonia cases in the valley, he sought help of the Union Government through a technical team of experts for analysing such cases and advising on probable containment of its spread.</span><br />