As Bihar’s COVID-19 case tally approaches the 1 lakh mark, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has urged officials to ramp up testing. Prasad who represents the Patna Saheb constituency in the Lok Sabha also visited three dedicated COVID-19 hospitals and an isolation centre on Thursday.
The Central Minister for Law and Justice, Electronics and Information Technology and Communications also took to Twitter sharing details from his visit. Garbed in a full PPE kit, Prasad met patients in the COVID-19 wards and assured them of all medical assistance.
The Minister spoke to the doctors and nurses at the various hospitals and lauded them for their work. The doctors have requested the Minister to arrange for more medicines and equipment to fight the virus. Prasad also distributed PPE kits and other equipment in the COVID-19 wards of Medical College Hospital, Nalanda Medical College Hospital and Pataliputra stadium which has been converted into a COVID-19 hospital.
Prasad said that there had been an improvement in the facilities in the past 15 days.
Responding to the request for more medicines and equipment, and in keeping with his advice to increase testing, the Minister has assured that ten more machines would be added to raise the daily testing facility to one lakh. At present there are there are 16 RT-PCR machines available in the state. He also said that all beds in COVID-19 wards will have oxygen cylinders.
Prasad also consoled the family members of Manoj Kumar Srivastava, the former additional chief secretary of disaster management who died from the virus at AIIMS Patna on Thursday. He had been put on the ventilator four days ago. His wife had also been affected by the virus, but she had recovered.
