While every other state in the country has been declaring everyday as to how many tests it is doing for finding Coronavirus, only Telangana state has been avoiding disclosure of testing details.
While Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao shouts at the reporters who raise this question, health minister Etala Rajender, who holds press meets regularly, has only been denying the charges that the state was conducting less number of tests.
“We are doing tests only as per the norms of the World Health Organisation and Indian Council of Medical Research. It is not correct to say that we are conducting lesser number of tests,” Rajender said on Friday again, but has not disclosed the total number of tests done so far and how many the state is doing every day.
But on Friday, the state high court severely reprimanded the Telangana government for being non-transparent on the number of tests being done to test Coronavirus. It sought to know why the state was conducting lesser number of tests.
Acting on a petition filed by retired professor P L Vishweshar Rao, the high court heard the arguments through video conference. It asked the state government as to why it was conducting tests only on suspected Covid patients and why it was not conducting tests on the deceased patients who die of co-morbidities.
When advocate general replied that the state government was only following the guidelines of the WHO and ICMR, the high court asked him to show where it was mentioned in the guidelines that tests should be conducted only symptomatic patients.
The court wondered why the government was not interested in conducting maximum number of tests at a time when the Covid-19 was spreading fast across the country.
“How can we identify Covid-19 patients if sufficient number of tests were not conducted. If you confuse the people with statistics, how can they know the factual position on Coronavirus?” the court asked and posted the case to May 14 for further hearing.
