Severe Covid wave in Supreme Court, 10 judges infected | India News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: An unprecedented severe Covid wave is sweeping through the Supreme Court and threatening to disrupt its functioning as 10 Judges have tested positive so far and the daily tests conducted on SC staff is returning an alarmingly consistent 30% positivity rate, official sources said on Tuesday.
Out of the 32 judges in the Supreme Court, including the CJI, so far 10 have tested positive for coronavirus infection. “Two of the infected judges – Justices K M Joseph and P S Narasimha – have since recovered and joined back work,” the sources told TOI. At present eight judges have been rendered non-functional being down with Covid infection posing a huge administrative challenge to CJI NV Ramana to constitute an adequate number of benches to hear the relatively urgent matters.
The central government health services medical facilities led by Dr Shyama Gupta is battling it out by working almost round the clock to look after the medical needs of the infected judges and staff. It is conducting 100-200 RT-PCR tests on an daily average basis and finding that the infection rate consistently hover around the alarming 30% level, leaving many staff non-functional, adding to the burden of both the healthcare staff and the registry in getting the daily work allocated to alternative personnel.
The sources said that of around 1500 staff in SC, as many as 400 have tested positive so far in the third wave of the pandemic, taking the overall positivity rate to nearly 30%.
To add to the woes of Dr Gupta, out of the five doctors in the CGHS centre in the Supreme Court, three have tested positive and are quarantined, leaving just her and another doctor to face grave risk of contracting the infection while attending to an increasing number of Covid patients daily. On January 9, four judges had tested positive. Within a week, the number of infected judges has doubled.
Under the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), a red alert is declared when the positivity rate remains above 5% for two consecutive days. In SC, the positivity rate among Judges have remained around 25% for the last two days posing fresh worries to CJI Ramana, who is constantly monitoring the health of all judges and the staff.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court Bar Association led by Vikas Singh has for the time being not insisted on starting physical hearing of cases in the court, which from the new year has again reverted back to complete virtual mode for hearing of cases. From October to November end, when the Covid cases had shown marked decline, the SCBA president was in the forefront to vociferously demand resumption of complete physical hearing.