The state government announced on Wednesday that if a patient is admitted to a hospital due to post-Covid complications, the treatment will be free of charge even if the Covid report is negative.
Several medical institutions had questioned whether such patients should be charged or not when the order was issued.
“In several cases, even after a negative RT-PCR test, a patient has to stay admitted in the hospital due to post-Covid issues. In hospitals run under the Medical Education Department, some facilities for non-Covid patients are available on the basis of payment. However, some medical institutions had raised a query that if a Covid negative patient is kept in the general ward, should they be charged or not. Therefore, in this regard I have been directed to inform that after a Covid patient is tested negative and if the patient is admitted in the general ward as a post-Covid patient, then their treatment would be free of cost,” Chief Secretary Alok Kumar wrote in a letter to health officials.
Meanwhile, the daily Covid positivity rate — the number of positive cases per 100 tests — fell below 1% on Wednesday, according to the state government. This is the first time since mid-April that the positivity rate has fallen below 1%.
On April 24, the positivity rate reached a high of 16.84 percent. The percentage has now dropped to 0.93 percent. On Tuesday, the state administered over 3.58 lakh Covid tests, with 3,371 of them yielding positive results.
The state now has only 62,271 active cases, which is 20% less than the first wave’s peak and less than the second wave’s peak. With 196 deaths in the last 24 hours, the state’s death toll has risen to 19,712.
