Ensure lockdown implementation, avoid oxygen wastage: Stalin to ministers

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin tasked the ministers to ensure full implementation of the two-week lockdown beginning May 10

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin

on Sunday tasked the ministers to ensure full implementation of the two-week lockdown beginning May 10 and make sure that oxygen is used in a proper manner and its wastage avoided in hospitals.

Chairing the first Cabinet meeting, Stalin asked his colleagues to keep tabs on the Covid-19 scenario and management and besides other things, monitor the sale of anti-viral Remdesivir and see to it that the medicine was not sold in the black market, an official release here said.

Remdesivir is being sold by the government in Chennai, Coimbatore, Salem, Tiruchirappalli, Madurai and Tirunelveli.

Stalin said Ministers should ensure implementation of lockdown in the districts assigned to them as compliance alone could contain the virus spread and bring down the deaths.

Also, proper treatment for patients needed to be made and amenities, including food for doctors, nurses and people being treated should be improved.

In spite of several challenges, oxygen was being supplied to government and private hospitals and hence ministers should make sure that it is used in a proper manner and wastage avoided in hospitals.

To increase coverage of vaccination in all districts, awareness should be increased among the people.

Only if government departments, including health, revenue, police and urban and rural development worked in tandem could the efforts aimed at tackling COVID-19 succeed, the Chief Minister said and directed the ministers to ensure that by holding combined review meetings.