Raising the issue of paucity of COVID-19 testing kits in West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday blamed the Central government for creating a “health hazard” in the State.
The State and the Centre have been at loggerheads for the past few days as the number of cases see a jump in the State and in the country.
On Wednesday, Ms. Banerjee said the Centre was not supplying an adequate number of kits. There are three types of kits, she said. One is rapid testing kit and the other is BGI Group’s real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), while the third one is antigen kits. “The BGI RT-PCRs are withdrawn as per the email from NICED, received yesterday [Tuesday]. Antigen KITS are not available in the Bengal Hospital. Therefore, the State would not even have one kit currently in stock. All rapid testing kits sent to our State have been withdrawn,” said Ms. Banerjee.
“The Health Department had made previous orders, but we do not know when we will receive those orders,” she said. “While 2,500 viral transport kits were provided by the Centre, we did 7,037 tests. We required 14,000 kits.”
Ms. Banerjee claimed that the Centre provided it with 7,000 PPE kits “while the State government has distributed 4,19,000 kits.”
More than half a dozen doctors’ associations have written to the Chief Minister seeking protective measures for frontline medical staff as per national and international guidelines as well increased testing for the virus. The letter is also signed by Santanu Sen, Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP, who heads the Indian Medical Association. He said if health care providers get affected, not only will they become bigger source of epidemic but the healthcare also can collapse in near future.