Low Testing, High Infection And A Lot Of Politics, What Is Happening In Bengal During Covid-19
At a time when the number of COVID-19 cases in the state is on the rise, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee triggered controversy after she said that "lakhs and lakhs of people can't be quarantined, the government has its own limit.?
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Banerjee was speaking in the context of allowing COVID-19 patients with the provision to isolate himself at his residence.?
Saying that the practice of home-quarantining coronavirus positive cases was being followed in several countries, Banerjee added, “A person can be the most comfortable at their own home. In a hospital, they come in contact with other patients, are exposed to other infections. At home, they can live according to their convenience, have it cleaned the way they like. We can’t quarantine lakhs and lakhs of people at government facilities.”?
While the Union Health Ministry has issued guidelines for home quarantine of patients with mild symptoms, the West Bengal CM has not made that distinction.
And later the West Bengal Health Department clarified that COVID-19 positive patients should be mandatorily brought to hospitals. Only primary/secondary contacts will be allowed home isolation.
This is the latest in a series of developments amid the COVID-19 outbreak where West Bengal is on a different trajectory in dealing with the pandemic than the rest of the country.?
To start with there is a lot of confusion around how bad the COVID-19 outbreak in West Bengal is. According to the figures on the Union Health Ministry, the state has so far recorded 697 COVID-19 positive cases and 20 deaths.?
But this is out of the 12043 samples the state has tested so far. The highest one-day sample test in Bengal was on Sunday when a total of 1150 them were tested.Bengal had conducted only 5,469 tests until April 20; in the next seven days, it performed 6,574 more.?
It also has the lowest testing rate among large states, but the number of those testing positive is much higher at 5.8 per cent.?
But there is another bigger mismatch - the death rate. Officially only 20 people have died of COVID-19 in West Bengal, but others claim it is 57.?
According to state Chief Secretary Rajiva Sinha, only 18 of them died of COVID-19 and the remaining 39 people died due to severe co-morbid conditions, which were immediate causes of the deaths and coronavirus was the incidental finding.?
BJP’s state president Dilip Ghosh alleged, “People dying from COVID-19 are being assigned other causes in their death certificates."?
With the state going into election next year, managing the pandemic has also taken a political turn.West Bengal was one of the first states to claim that the kits supplied by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) were faulty and have been throwing up inconclusive results and delaying the pace of testing.?
Last week there was another faceoff after the visit of the Inter Ministerial Central Team to West Bengal.TMC had described the two inter-ministerial central teams visiting West Bengal to assess the Covid-19 situation as "India's Most Callous Team", which, it said, has sought to spread the political virus "shamelessly".?
In a letter to Chief Secretary Sinha, the inter-ministerial central team flagged non-cooperation on the part of the state government over providing logistical support and other relevant information.
