PANJIM: The Aam Aadmi Party on Friday slammed the State government for issuing a mortality bulletin to justify the increasingly high death toll in Goa.
State Convenor Rahul Mhambre said that the real cause of deaths in Goa is the critical shortage of treatment facilities such as oxygen beds, ICU beds, and ventilators.
Rahul repeated the party’s demand that real-time availability of such beds be made public through an App-dashboard or a ward war room seen in other States.
Pointing out that no other State in the country publishes such confidential medical details of COVID victims, Raul accused the Health Minister of trying to blame the high death toll on the patients themselves.
Addressing the Chief Minister and Health Minister’s repeated claim that patients are dying because they don’t come to hospitals on time, Raul said that a major cause of delay in admission is due to shortage of beds in most COVID hospitals, and patients are not aware where to go to in case their health deteriorates. In such a situation, a portal or App-dashboard with real-time availability of beds would help save precious lives.
Additionally, Raul said that the government should discuss this delay with the doctors involved in tele-consultation of positive patients under home isolation, and find out the reasons why such patients are not seeking hospitalisation faster.
Questioning the motivation behind revealing patients’ confidential details such as co-morbidities, he reminded the Health Minister that in August last year where the COVID death toll was less than 100, the Health Department had shockingly claimed that “these patients with co-morbidities would have died anyway”.
Now that deaths have crossed more than 1,100, is the Health Minister continuing to use the same excuse to hide its own failures in providing treatment facilities?
As warned by AAP earlier, the hunt for oxygen cylinders and concentrators in the open market has already begun. It was shocking to see the BJP’s own Central government cap Goa’s oxygen supply to 11 tonnes in COVID times, when Goa’s purchase was 40 tonnes in normal, non-COVID times.
