The Jharkhand government has approved one month’s extra pay as an incentive to health workers who are engaged in Covid-19 duties.

The decision was taken at a state cabinet meeting chaired by chief minister Hemant Soren in Ranchi on Friday evening.

“The cabinet has approved incentives for health department workers, including doctors engaged in coronavirus related contact tracing, testing, supervision and other related work in Covid hospitals and wards besides control rooms, which will be equivalent to their one month’s salary,” an official statement after the cabinet meeting said.

The incentive will be equivalent to the basic salary of April 2020.

Health minister Banna Gupta had in March announced a Rs 103-crore incentive for frontline health workers in the state Assembly.

The chief minister had also announced in May on social media that one month’s additional salary will be given to doctors and medical workers employed to contain the pandemic.

“The proposal would be sent for approval to the finance department for the release of funds. It would take at least a month for the funds to be released to the accounts of the health department staff concerned,” said a senior official of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) unit of the health department.

The state on Friday registered 13 more Covid deaths taking the total casualties to 5,034 and recorded 478 fresh cases taking the active caseload to 6,832.

Meanwhile, as part of its effort to increase testing of samples, the state government will send another 44 TrueNat machines to 16 districts which have witnessed high numbers of Covid cases in addition to the 222 TrueNat machines installed in all 24 districts. This would be in addition to the eight state-owned and four private RT-PCR labs in the state.

Another 14 TrueNat machines have also been sent to the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences, CCL Hospital (both in Ranchi), Tata Main Hospital (Jamshedpur), Bokaro General Hospital and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Deoghar.

“The TrueNat machine would be used for urgent Covid tests of patients requiring surgical intervention, pregnant women, dialysis, emergency operation and other emergency cases and suspected coronavirus deaths,” said state health department nodal officer Siddharth Tripathy.The health department has also written to the director of RIMS, Ranchi, principals of medical colleges and hospitals and nodal officers of RT-PCR labs to ensure that all samples of Covid victims and 15 randomly collected samples from the places of outbreak in their jurisdiction are sent to the Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar, to identify the coronavirus variants.

“The directive was given following an instruction from the Union health ministry,” added Tripathy.