As Covid cases spike, TN brings back its crisis man
In a surprise development, Dr Beela Rajesh, the state health secretary who won praise for her daily excellent media briefings on the Covid-19 developments in Tamil Nadu, was transferred on Friday, and posted as secretary to the government commercial taxes and registration department.
One of the senior most IAS officers, a scholar and an able administrator, Dr J. Radhakrishnan, whom the government had recently appointed as special nodal officer to coordinate with the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) in all Covid-19 prevention and containment
activities, is now back at the helm of affairs in the Health department as Principal Secretary to Government, Health and Family Welfare Department, an official order said.
Having handled major medico-social crisis events in the state during earlier regimes, including the Kumbakonam school fire tragedy, the December 2004 Tsunami in Nagapattinam district and so on, the AIADMK government has now given Dr Radhakrishnan a free hand to deal with the rising Coronavirus scenario in Chennai in particular, and in the State at large though the problem is not much in the districts.
Dr Beela Rajesh took bold decisions like instituting “death audit” for the first time in Tamil Nadu on each instance of patient fatality who came for Covid-19 treatment, and also recently set up an inter-departmental committee to reconcile the alleged discrepancies in the death numbers vis-avis Chennai Covid-19 cases between the department and the civic body.