The Union health ministry on Thursday asked states to prepare to revive decommissioned Covid-19 facilities and bolster hospital resources amid fears of omicron-driven surges, although there is uncertainty about how the surges might impact the demand for hospitals.

Health secretary Rajesh Bhushan, at a review meeting, asked state health officials to increase bed capacity, check on ambulance pick-up mechanisms, and ensure readiness of oxygen equipment.

Bhushan also asked the states to maintain 30-day buffer stocks of medicines used in Covid-19 treatment, enhance the capacity of healthcare systems to respond to emergencies and accelerate vaccination campaigns to ensure everyone eligible got both doses.

He iterated the advisory urging district-level local containment measures for at least 14 days wherever test positivity rates rose to 10 per cent or higher for a week or if oxygen bed occupancy crossed 40 per cent.

The containment actions recommended by the ministry include night curfews, curbs on large gatherings, especially ahead of the forthcoming festivities, and prompt notification and perimeter control of containment and buffer zones around any clusters of cases.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a review meeting on Covid-19 preparedness on Thursday evening during which he directed central officials to send teams to states with low vaccination rates, rising cases, or insufficient health infrastructure to help them address those issues.

India on Thursday documented 7,495 new Covid-19 cases, an increase over the 6,317 cases detected during the previous 24 hours. But the seven-day average of daily new infections has remained steady below 10,000 although the country’s count of omicron cases has grown to more than 220 over the past four weeks.

Medical experts believe that when omicron counts in the country exceed certain critical thresholds, India will experience infection surges but, they say, there is still uncertainty on how much pressure those surges will impose on hospital resources.

Early evidence from South Africa and the UK have prompted some experts to suggest that omicron-driven waves come with lower levels of severe disease, but others have cautioned that a fast-spreading virus could quickly overwhelm hospitals through sheer counts of new infections.

“Five times milder in 20 times more people (is) four times worse,” Thomas Agoritsas, professor of medicine at the Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland, tweeted early on Thursday. “We must not lower our guard.”

The health ministry has also asked the states to test all patients with influenza-like illness or severe acute respiratory illness for Covid-19, conduct door-to-door search for patients in containment zones, and test all patients under guidelines from the Indian Council of Medical Research.

The omicron-driven waves in South Africa, the UK and elsewhere have triggered fears of a tsunami of omicron cases in India. The UK’s seven-day average daily new infections on Thursday exceeded 90,000 — a rate if applied to India would mean over 1.8 million daily cases, or fourfold India’s peak during the second wave.