Bengaluru, Mar 27: Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) on Friday formed a task force to monitor the spread of COVID-19 disease in the state and provide guidelines and suggestions to contain its proliferation in the state.
In a press release, the KPCC has stated that the 15 member committee will be headed by the senior Congress leader and former Health minister K R Rameshkumar also included two other former health ministers, Shivanand Patil and U T Khader as the members of the committee.
Mangaluru, Jul 15: Amidst mounting coronavirus cases, the district administration has finalised 80 covid care centres (CCC) in Dakshina Kannada.
Sindhu B Rupesh, deputy commissioner of DK, said that as many as 80 premises that were functioning as quarantine centres have now been identified as CCCs in the district.
People in the district have been demanding that CCCs should be opened for asymptomatic cases in the district too.
A majority of around 1,500 active cases in Dakshina Kannada are asymptomatic, and the CCCs will help those planning to go to private hospitals to reduce their treatment costs.
Additional deputy commissioner M J Roopa said that the 80 CCCs identified throughout the district will work as care centres for asymptomatic Covid-19 patients.
A medical team will attend to the centres, and supply of food and water will be taken care of by the government. In case of any health issues, the patient will be shifted to the Covid hospital, she said.
“All asymptotic Covid-19 patients, who are unable to opt for home isolation, are being kept in CCCs. A designated health team will monitor each CCC in the district. Meanwhile, the nearest public health centre (PHC) will have an ambulance on standby in case of an emergency,” she added.
Bengaluru, Jun 17: Amid rising COVID cases in the past two weeks, the Karnataka government is planning to increase testing capacity to 25,000 samples a day, said a minister.
"Due to increase in cases in the last two weeks, the government is trying to scale up testing to 15,000 to 25,000 samples per day," said Medical Education Minister K. Sudhakar.
He said people living in crowded places, sanitation workers, street vendors, healthcare workers, police and other frontline staff would be extensively tested.
"It has also been decided to mandatorily test all those who have symptoms of Influenza Like Illness (ILI) and Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI)," he said.
Similarly, all people over 50 with ILI symptoms will be tested.
The health department will also randomly test samples in old containment zones to make sure that the infection is not recurring.
Currently, there are 72 Covid testing labs in the southern state, 41 government operated and 31 private labs.
However, for a few days, the number of Covid tests in the state have plummeted.
On Monday, the health department has tested only 5,362 samples across the state.
Likewise, on Tuesday, only 7,936 samples were tested, diverging from earlier weeks when around 10,000 cases were tested on an average.
In all, 4.57 lakh samples have been tested so far, of which 4.39 lakh have tested negative.
May 6: Congress general secretary KC Venugopal on Tuesday termed as "inhumane" the government's decision to "impose excessive costs" on NRIs and expatriates for bringing them into the country from COVID-19-affected nations.
He demanded that the central government fly in the poor and vulnerable free of cost while charge the others with normal fares instead of high costs.
"The central government's decision to impose excessive costs on NRIs flying in special flights from the Covid-affected countries is an inhumane act," he said in a statement.
Venugopal said it was due to protests by a large number of expatriates and their relatives as well as the general public over the past few days that the central government took the decision to bring back Indian citizens from abroad.
"However, it is cruel that the Central government has taken advantage of this plight of expatriates by increasing the price of air fares up to three times. This is inhumane," Venugopal said in his statement.
He urged the Centre to take urgent steps to provide free travel to the most vulnerable, unemployed, sick and pregnant women and to others on normal fare.
Air India will operate 64 repatriation flights for a week from May 7 while the Navy deployed two ships as India rolled out a massive evacuation plan on Tuesday to bring back thousands of its nationals stranded abroad due to the coronavirus-triggered lockdown.
Those availing the repatriation flights will be charged, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri told a virtual press conference in New Delhi. A passenger on a London-Delhi flight will be charged Rs 50,000 and on a Dhaka-Delhi flight Rs 12,000, he added.
From the Gulf countries to Malaysia and the UK to the US, the multi-agency operation christened 'Vande Bharat Mission' will see the state-owned airline operate the non-scheduled commercial flights till May 13 to ferry around 15,000 Indian nationals from 12 countries.
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