Vijayawada, May 12 :Asserting that incidents like in RUIA Hospital must not be repeated, Minister for Health Alla Kali Krishna Srinivas said that the government has taken all the required measures right from setting up oxygen monitoring cell in every hospital to appointing three senior officials to overlook the supply of oxygen from neighboring states.

A Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by Minister Alla Nani held a press conference here on Wednesday after the review meeting and briefed the COVID-19 preventive measures being implemented by the state government. The Minister said that the committee had discussed key issues like oxygen supply, testing, vaccination, beds and steps to be taken to bring down the cases.

He said that Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy had given clear instructions to all the district collectors to verify the oxygen pipelines and complete the repair works on war footing to avoid incidents like RUIA hospital in future. Also 49 mini oxygen plants are to be set up across the State in various teaching hospitals, District and Area hospitals.

He said the need for oxygen in the second wave was high as the number of oxygen required cases were almost doubled and hence three senior IAS officers were deployed to monitor the oxygen transport from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Odisha. During the first wave, the State hardly used 240 MT of oxygen on a daily basis, where only 50 percent of designated oxygen beds were occupied.

However, in the current scenario, the daily requirement is over 590 MT, which was allocated by the Centre and yet facing shortage. Although the state is equipped with 27500 oxygen beds, still running with shortage and thus setting up another 10,000 beds across the State, he added.

The Minister said that they had already written a letter to the Prime Minister that the state needed 910 metric tonnes of oxygen. On the other hand, he stated that all measures are being taken to ensure that oxygen is not wasted, by setting up monitoring cells in each hospital. Also, the storage capacity is being increased to 600 MT from the existing 517 MT.

Speaking in regard to vaccination, he said that the government has been trying to complete the vaccination programme faster, where the Chief Minister has also written letters to Centre requesting to provide six crore doses to the State. The government has a capacity to administer over six lakh doses in a single day and was ready to spend Rs 1600 crore for getting vaccines.

On this occasion, Deputy CM Alla Nani slammed opposition leader Chandrababu Naidu for making ‘irresponsible remarks’ against the State government and ‘creating panic among the public’. He made it clear that they had no objection to purchasing vaccines from the manufacturers but the control of vaccine supply is still with the Centre.

He said that Chandrababu Naidu can supply vaccines to the State by using his kinship with Bharat Biotech. Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy had already made it clear that he wanted the vaccination process to be free and would not hesitate to spend Rs 1,600 crore.

Ministers Mekathoti Sucharita, Kurasala Kannababu, Buggana Rajendranath Reddy, Botsa Satyanarayana were present in the meeting.(UNI)