Chennai: The Taminadu government today capped the charges for Covid-19 treatment in private hospitals across the State and announced that no fee over and above the fixed slab can be claimed from patients.
The per day charges for treatment in Intensive Care Units shall not exceed Rs 15,000 and in general wards, for asymptomatic people and those with mild symptoms, the maximum is Rs 7,500, the government said.
Following patients’ complaints of exorbitant fee in private hospitals for Covid-19 treatment, a panel headed by Health Secretary Beela Rajesh submitted a report to the government on permissible charges for private hospitals, an official release here said.
The government, considering the report, has fixed the upper ceiling. “The charges that have been announced are the maximum. No fee over and above the permitted charges can be collected from the patients,” the government said.
It may be noted that the State continued to witness a surge in Covid-19 infections with 1,438 cases and 12 deaths reported on Friday, taking the count to 28,694 and fatalities to 232. Of the fresh positive cases, Chennai alone accounted for 1,116 with the State capital’s aggregate touching a whopping 19,826.
Continuing with the trend of a new high everyday, Tamilnadu on the sixth straight day yesterday reported 1,000 plus cases and the newly infected include six people from Qatar, five from Dubai and one from Sri Lanka, a health department bulletin said. While 14 were returnees from Delhi, seven were from Maharashtra and those infected Friday comprises 851 men, 584 women and three transgenders.
The silver lining is that 12,697 are the active cases with 861 people getting discharged Friday from various hospitals and totally 15,762 have got cured of the illness caused by the pathogen. Also, 800 plus recoveries in a single day is the highest in the past 10 days.
With the capital city registering an unabated spike in Covid- 19 cases, the Tamilnadu government announced a group of five Ministers to oversee work by the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) and the field support teams.
Of the 15 zones in the GCC, each Minister has been assigned three zones and they would monitor the containment efforts by the corporation and the field support team, a government order said.