Gandhinagar, Jan 22 (PTI) The report of the first state-level COVID-19 Intra Action Review (IAR) in India conducted in Gujarat by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar as per World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines was released on Friday.

It was released in the presence of WHO Representative in India Dr Roedrico Ofrin and Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani.

"We have very little information of the 1921 flu, in terms of how many peaks it had, what were protocols followed, how did the administration responded. This exercise is about future proofing," Dr Ofrin said after releasing the report.

"The documentation will make us better prepared to deal with future pandemics and the body of knowledge will be helpful to other parts of the world also. The response was from different departments and it is important to have a proper record of our responses from independent sources," he said.

Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani said the pandemic was a new situation for everyone and neither the medical fraternity or administration knew how to deal with it.

"The records of the past pandemic of 1920s are hardly available. Now after one year, this AIR is the record of how the administration dealt with the COVID-19 crisis, what was the response to control the pandemic," the CM said.

Rupani said, in case there is something similar in the future, administrators will have recorded documentations to guide them on the response.

Before this, the WHO recommended IAR was conducted in Thailand and Indonesia, making India the third country in South-East Asia to carry out the review, officials said, adding that Gujarat was the first state in the country to undertake this activity.

The IAR was conducted by third party institutes like IIM-Ahmedabad and IIPH-Gandhinagar by interviewing COVID-19 responders, and key reflections from the pandemic management in the state were documented under 10 different response pillars as identified by WHO.

The response review report discusses key strategies, challenges faced and ways adopted to deal with them, as well as some recommendations for strengthening the health system to manage COVID-19 and other eventualities.

IIM-A professor Ranjan Ghosh and IIPH director Dr Dileep Mavalankar have worked hard to prepare the IAR, said officials.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)