Find out reasons behind Amravati’s high death rate due to Covid-19: HC

Nagpur: Expressing concern over the exponential rise in Covid-19 cases that led to high death rate in Amravati, the Nagpur bench of Bombay high court sternly directed the authorities to take necessary steps for finding out reasons behind both these factors.
“The Amravati Municipal Corporation (AMC) should submit its response before Friday on steps taken on compliance of guidelines issued from time to time by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) on dealing with Covid-19 cases,” justice Anil Kilor said, while warning the authorities that no further time would be granted to file reply on an affidavit.
The directives came while hearing a petition by Shivaray Kulkarni through counsel Pankaj Navlani.
Pointing out towards non-compliance of ICMR guidelines by the corporation, he contended that the district witnessed manifold rise in the positive cases with highest mortality rate and pattern is unique. He prayed for directives to the respondents for activating Disaster Recovery Task Force there.
Claiming that AMC is very slow in tracing out the contacts, Navlani argued that it was leading to spurt in the numbers of persons affected by COVID-19 with each passing day. He also claimed that contact tracing was not properly carried out and there are missing links.
Pleading on AMC’s behalf, counsel Gemini Kasat said the necessary steps have already been taken and they’re trying their level best to break the chain of the coronavirus cases. He however sought time to file a detailed reply on steps taken to contain the spread.
Earlier, Amravati collector filed an affidavit where he denied all the allegations stating that the administration is working as per the guidelines issued by centre and state. He said that due to their efforts, the AIIMS approved Virus Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (VRDL) at Amravati University’s Department of Biotechnology and it had started testing samples of Covid-19 patients.
In reply, the petitioner came out with an additional affidavit claiming that the VRDL centre started recently on May 4 and over 350 samples were pending for testing. He claimed that due to lax attitude from the police machinery after their powers to take coercive action were removed, the deadly virus has spread all over 16 regions of the district.
Kulkarni claimed that even though Amravati is observing a unique pattern for spread of virus, the respondents aren’t taking steps to trace out its source, when the need is to conduct aggressive testing on the lines of Bhilwara model in Rajasthan.
“The Bhilwara administration aggressively tested 25-30 lakh people within a week’s time. Amravati though having a unique pattern has only tested around 1,500 citizens. As a result, the number of patients have jumped like wildfire and over ten have lost their lives,” he said, adding that while stressing on the need to give powers to cops for coercive action against the lockdown violators.