MAPUSA
Expressing concern over the rise in Covid cases in Goa, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Saturday said that instead of ramping up testing and offering better facilities the chief minister was blaming the people for the rise in mortalities.
AAP also slammed the government over the much-delayed launch of home-isolation kit and called it a publicity stunt.
“Patients don’t reach hospital on time as ambulance services to ferry them are not available. People are unable to get admitted in hospitals at the right time as they are not getting tested on time. The government is unable to provide overpriced ventilators to serious patients. All this shows that the government is unable to provide proper infrastructure to deal with Covid and thereby risking the lives of Goans,” said Surel Tilve, spokesperson of AAP.
The AAP spokesperson was addressing the media in response to CM Pramod Sawant’s statement that 95 percent of Covid deaths were due to comorbidities and 5 percent because people came late for treatment.
Continuing, Tilve said the government should put a more transparent system in place for Goans to know about the Covid facilities available in their area. He said the Delhi government solved this efficiently by making all the data transparent through an app.
“The government should start providing hospital beds status locality wise on a real-time basis. The number of Covid ambulances has not increased despite assurances from the health minister. People have to wait for over 10 hours for ambulances,” he said.
The AAP spokesperson said the most important thing to control Covid spread was to increase testing but the State government fell woefully short in this aspect too.
“It is shocking to see that while the Corona graph is increasing, the number of testing is still stagnant between 1,500-2,000 tests a day. Why can’t we increase it to minimum 5,000 per day in Goa so that tracing and isolating suspects will be easier and which in turn stop the rapid spread,” he said.
He further suggested starting a service of mobile testing vans to help people in remote areas.
Tilve slammed the government’s launch of the much-fancied home isolation kit which was announced two months ago.
“How can you do a publicity stunt on something which should have been done months ago? The entire home isolation system has no protocol whatsoever and the IMA was forced to terminate its services,” he said.
