Congress MP from Malkajgiri A. Revanth Reddy, who is also the working president of Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC), has requested the Centre to take over the handling of coronavirus pandemic from the hands of State government immediately, stating that the latter has failed to control the spread of the virus and lost confidence of the people.
He submitted a representation to Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Lav Agarwal, who headed a Central team that visited Hyderabad on Monday to take stock of the situation by visiting containment areas and hospitals and had a meeting with the State government officials. In that, Mr. Reddy said Telangana, particularly Hyderabad, would witness a huge surge in COVID cases if the Centre did not intervene and constitute a committee to handle the situation.
He explained that the test positivity rate of COVID in Telangana was 32.1% as on June 23 and is the highest among major cities in the country. The rate of testing per 10 lakh population was very low in Telangana and only 70,000 tests were conducted till June 23 in spite of the Indian Council of Medical Research asking the State to scale up tests, he added.
Stating that there was a shortage of testing machines at only 22 compared to 42 in the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, the Congress MP said only one Central lab was available for testing since the government had not utilised 22 private labs. The claims about readying the Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences at Gachibowli was only hype since it did not have the required human resources or any equipment, barring a few beds donated by some corporate hospitals. It doesn’t even have a sewage treatment plant, he pointed out.
Even the only recognised full-fledged government hospital for COVID treatment, Gandhi Hospital was seeing shortage of staff, medicines, equipment and poor hygiene, putting immense stress on the available staff. The doctors working there were not being provided sufficient protective gear and a 72-hour protest by doctors demanding provision of ample PPE kits had also failed to have any impact on the government, Mr Reddy alleged.
