Amid the second wave of the pandemic sweeping across the country, a PIL filed in the Delhi Court on Monday urged the HC to direct the AAP government to cap the price of High Resolution Computerised Tomography (HRCT) which is used for detecting the presence and severity of Covid-19 infection in the lungs of patients.
The plea was filed by lawyer Shivleen Pasricha, who in a petition stated that with the rise in Covid-19 infections in the national capital, the price of HRCT has skyrocketed with labs charging patients about Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,500.
The developments come in the backdrop of Delhi’s Covid-19 positivity rate reducing to 28.33vper cent on Sunday.
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The national capital logged 20,394 new infections and 407 Covid-19 fatalities during the last 24 hours, according to a bulletin issued by the Delhi health department. This is the second day on the trot that the capital has recorded over 400 fatalities due to the deadly virus.
While hearing Pasricha’s plea, a bench of Chief Justice D N Patel and Justice Jasmeet Singh issued notice to the Delhi government and sought its stand on the issue.
"At present, the price for getting HRCT done in Delhi is somewhere between Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,500. As such, regulation of price of the same has become the need of an hour.
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"That in light of the present gruesome circumstances in Delhi, regulating the price of HRCT, becomes all imperative and necessary," the petition stated.
According to the petition, filed through advocate Amresh Anand, the cost of HRCT in the national capital is "unregulated and very high" beyond what a common man can afford.
It has further claimed that HRCT has, in the current state of circumstances, become one of the most relevant and vital tests, recommended actively by the doctors for the diagnosis, management and treatment of infection in suspected or probable Covid-19 patients.
"Of late, it has been seen that multiple variants of Covid-19 are not detectable through RT-PCR.
"As such, for better diagnosis, a large number of doctors today are alternatively recommending HRCT test/ scan to suspected/ probable COVID-19 patients for detecting the presence and determining the specificity and severity of COVID-19 infection in them," the petition has said.
HRCT is basically an imaging procedure that uses narrow beams of X-rays to create a high-resolution image of the patient's lung anatomy, the plea stated.
(With PTI inputs)
