New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed the Telangana high court order telling hospitals to conduct COVID-19 tests on dead bodies before releasing them.
The Supreme Court bench led by Justice Ashok Bhushan noted that direction issued by the high court dated May 26 was “premature” at this stage, as per media reports.
The bench also stayed the direction passed by the high court on June 8 that non-compliance with the order will attract a contempt of court action. The high court told the state government that “neither the majesty of the law, nor the majesty of the high court, can be ignored”.
The next hearing of the case will be in two weeks.
After the high court hearing, the Telangana state government had said that it was “impossible” to implement the directions.
“It is difficult to implement the high court order that coronavirus tests should be conducted on the dead for whatever reasons they have died. In the state, every day 900 to 1000 people die due to various reasons. Every day someone will die in some remote part of the state. It is not possible to conduct tests on them,” state government officials informed the chief minister, K. Chandrashekhar Rao, as per a press release issued on June 8.
The press note had also claimed that if medical staff in hospitals were deputed for conducting tests, they wouldn’t find time to attend to ailing patients.
The state government had also accused petitioners of filing PILs that have clogged up the government machinery.
Telangana has reported 5,675 cases of COVID-19, with 192 deaths. It has only started to report testing numbers from this week. The number of tests conducted so far by Telangana is among the lowest in the country, with the positive percentage among samples being third highest after Maharashtra and Delhi.