Delhi govt presents report card to HC, amicus raises further issues

New Delhi: The Delhi government on Thursday informed the Delhi High Court that it had dramatically increased its testing capacity and had also made significant progress in ramping up its fleet of ambulances to deal with the fast-increasing number of COVID-19 cases in the Capital. A Division Bench of Chief Justice DN Patel and Justice Prateek Jalan were being informed of recent developments in a suo moto matter concerning the preparedness of Delhi to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Officers posted in the hospitals should be made aware of the orders of this court and that the same are required to be implemented," the court said, adding that the Delhi government and the Centre had taken many steps to address the increase in cases here. Rahul Mehra, appearing for the Delhi Government, submitted that helplines had been increased, more ambulances are now being made available and infrastructure for dealing with the rising number of cases is being ramped up. "We're at least 15-20 days ahead of what is required of us as of today," Mehra said.

However, amicus Om Prakash asked the Delhi Government to specify how many of its ambulances are solely dedicated to COVID-19 patients or virus related medical emergencies. "There should be separate ambulances for COVID19 patients," Prakash said. In addition, the court-appointed amicus also submitted that real-time data is not available on the Delhi Corona application, further saying that hospitals did not address his requests for sharing data seriously, specifically Saroj Hospital, GTB Hospital and RML Hospital.

The court took issue with the matter and asked the government counsel, "Why are your officers not seeing the problems the way amicus is seeing them? If your officers are working, change them. If you can't change them, we will change them. Don't feel shy in taking action against adamant or errant officers. If these officers are not following your actions you should take action against them."

The court added, "Good action should not be washed away by the work of such officers. All the directions and efforts of the court will be of no use."