NE LEGAL BUREAU
AHMEDABAD, JULY 18
The Ahmedabad Medical Association (AMA) has moved the Gujarat High Court seeking a direction to the state government to increase the testing for coronavirus in a big way.
Labs that can conduct coronavirus tests should be set up in every district, it demanded.
The AMA has filed a civil application to be heard with public interest litigation (PIL) about the handling of the coronavirus situation in the state, taken up by the court on its own.
The matter is likely to come up for hearing next week.
The AMA application said the present rate of around 6,000 tests per day is not enough considering the population of Gujarat and the spread of the virus.
Per day tests in Gujarat should be at least five times that of Delhi (which is conducting 23,000 tests per day) as per a directive of the Union Government, it said.
The Union government has asked the states to utilise all the existing COVID-19 testing labs to ramp up testing, and “inconsistency in implementing the national strategy of testing, tracing and isolation will inevitably lead to uncontrolled increase in cases and deaths,” the association said.
Nineteen out of Gujarat’s 33 districts do not have laboratories that can conduct RT-PCR tests for COVID-19, it said.
There should be enough COVID-19 testing facilities in every district so that people need not travel far, the AMA said.
Citing the website of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the AMA said that 22 government and 16 private laboratories have got approval for coronavirus testing.
But three government and two private laboratories have not started conducting coronavirus tests despite getting ICMR”s nod because the Gujarat government has not given the green signal yet, it said.
As of Friday evening, Gujarat had recorded 46,516 coronavirus cases and 2,108 deaths.
