A two-judge bench of the Allahabad High Court, on Thursday, appreciated some of the steps taken by Uttar Pradesh government with regard to COVID-19.
The court noted that with regard to medical facilities, it does “…appreciate that some work has been done with regard to the improvement of medical infrastructure”. The improvement in facilitates being referred to are in Bahraich, Shravasti, Bijnor, Barabanki and Jaunpur. The court has expressed its desire that similar work should be done in five more districts—Bhadohi, Ghazipur, Ballia, Deoria and Shamli.
On May 17, perusing reports on the status of medical health infrastructure in the aforementioned five districts, the court had noted “..we have no hesitation in observing that health infrastructure is absolutely insufficient in city areas to meet the requirement of city population, and in rural areas the community health centres are virtually lacking in respect of life saving gadgets. In most of the districts, the Level-3 hospital facilities are not there.”
The court has been hearing a public interest litigation on ‘inhuman conditions at quarantine centres and for providing better treatment to Corona positive’.
On Thursday, the court also said it was satisfied with the work done in capping of fee for diagnostics. In respect of RT-PCR tests the fee ranges between Rs 500 and Rs 900. For Antigen tests the fee has been fixed for Rs 200. Rate for TrueNat private testing has been fixed for Rs 1200 while for CT Scan, depending in the number of slices, prices have been fixed between Rs 2,000 to Rs 2,500.
In the last hearing, the HC had been scathing in its observations. Referring to data from Bijnor and the other four districts it had observed, “..we have no hesitation in saying that in rural areas things would not improve in this way. For a rural population of 32 lakhs, as is the case of district Bijnor, every day four to five thousand tests should be conducted and all the tests should be through RT-PCR. This time if we fail to identify a COVID infected person at the earliest, we are definitely inviting a third wave. If we have to test 30 per cent of the population i.e. almost 10 lakhs in the rural areas of district Bijnor within three month’s time, then we will have to conduct 10,000 tests per day, but from the statement made by the district magistrate, we do not see any such robust testing in near future in district Bijnor and condition in other four districts are also same. If this is the state of affairs of five districts, one can guess where we are leading people of this state to i.e. third wave of the pandemic”.
The court had also labelled the status of the health system as ‘Ram bharose’—a statement that was stayed by the Supreme Court on May 21. The apex court had observed that the directions of the court, among others to provide two ambulances with intensive care facilities to every village, were practically impossible to implement.
