The Gujarat high court has come down hard on the Vijay Rupani-led BJP state government for trying to “artificially control” the COVID-19 epidemic. The court said that the civil hospital in Ahmedabad was as “good as a dungeon, maybe even worse".

Gujarat has, so far, had the highest COVID-19 death rate in the country.

“As we said earlier, the Civil Hospital is meant to treat patients. However, it appears that as on date, it is as good as a dungeon. Maybe even worse than a dungeon,” the bench said, while likening the poor state of infrastructure to the “sinking of the Titanic".

The HC also criticised the government’s testing protocol after it told the court that they would decide when private laboratories would start testing samples for coronavirus. Currently, there are only 19 government laboratories conducting RT-PCR tests for coronavirus patients, and only 1,78,068 samples have been tested.

Against this backdrop, the court asked the government to immediately procure testing kits and enable private facilities to carry out tests at government rates. It said that the state government until now was only trying to “artificially control the data qua the number of cases in the State of Gujarat”.

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