NEW DELHI: A PIL urged the Delhi High Court on Monday to direct the Delhi government to cap the price of High Resolution Computerised Tomography (HRCT) which is used for detecting the presence and severity of COVID-19 infection in the lungs of patients.
A bench of Chief Justice D N Patel and Justice Jasmeet Singh issued notice to the Delhi government and sought its stand on the plea by Shivleen Pasricha, a lawyer, who has claimed that for detection of COVID-19 amongst suspected/ probable patients, the most widely recommended test is RT-PCR.
"At present, the price for getting HRCT done in Delhi is somewhere between Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,500. As such, regulation of price of the same has become the need of an hour.
"That in light of the present gruesome circumstances in Delhi, regulating the price of HRCT, becomes all imperative and necessary," the petition has said.
According to the petition, filed through advocate Amresh Anand, the cost of HRCT in the national capital is "unregulated and very high" beyond what a common man can afford.
It has further claimed that HRCT has, in the current state of circumstances, become one of the most relevant and vital tests, recommended actively by the doctors for the diagnosis, management and treatment of infection in suspected or probable COVID-19 patients.
"Of late, it has been seen that multiple variants of COVID-19 are not detectable through RT-PCR.
"As such, for better diagnosis, a large number of doctors today are alternatively recommending HRCT test/ scan to suspected/ probable COVID-19 patients for detecting the presence and determining the specificity and severity of COVID-19 infection in them," the petition has said.
HRCT is basically an imaging procedure that uses narrow beams of X-rays to create a high-resolution image of the patient's lung anatomy, the plea has said.