Lekha G
The Division Bench comprising Chief Justice Hima Kohli and Justice B.Vijaysen Reddy on Friday observed that the details submitted by the Telangana government to the court on Covid testing, availability of beds, oxygen, medicines and mortality rate are a “ sackful of salt, window-dressing and fudged numbers”.
Considering the ‘All is well’ contention by the government, the court said “It was a dismal performance by the state, where the people are afraid to go hospitals, and even if they go, beds are not available and the RT-PCR test reports are being demanded for entry to the hospitals”.
The CJ observed that the figures of the fatality rate due to Covid were distorted and also pointed out the flaws in submissions of RT-PCR tests.
The state government said it was conducting 30,000 to 40,000 tests a day but reports suggest only 3.57 lakh tests being conducted in the last 21 days. According to the submissions 8.4 lakh tests were to be conducted.
The court questioned the 5-member committee constituted to curtail the spread of the virus on failure of conducting a meeting for the past 2 months.
The assistant solicitor general also complained against the state government, saying it was not attentive enough in appointing a nodal officer as suggested by Centre to co-ordinate.
Further the court criticized the Union government’s strict control in allocation of medicines and oxygen to states.
It also criticized the Centre’s perspective on issues like allowing political rallies, non-declaration of containment zones, lack of efforts to solve the migrant issue, black-marketers of life-saving drugs among others.
The court directed the state government to inform about its preparedness for administering vaccination to all those above 18 years of age from May 1 and assigned the secretary to health and family welfare of Telangana, Rizvi, to file a status report by April 27 indicating the state’s steps in administrating vaccines to prison inmates, senior citizen in old-age homes, occupants of orphanages and homes for visually disabled.
Thus, the court suggested that the state government could take up its own measures to deal with such emergency situations and said “So, ramp up the tests and procure all the medicines to treat covid-infected”.