West Bengal has finally admitted to faults in its system of collecting data on Coronavirus patients saying it was “not perfect and that some cases may have been missed out.”
However, the state’s Chief Secretary Rajiva Sinha quickly dismissed the faults saying it cannot add these new figures to the existing death toll.
the Inter-Ministerial Central Team (IMCT) deputed to West Bengal had noted discrepancies in the number of Coronavirus cases reported by the state in its medical bulletins and its communications with the Central government.
The central team had found that 72 COVID patients, who expired, were classified as death due to co-morbidities.
Eleven COVID-19 patients have died in the last 24 hours, the chief secretary said, raising the government death count to 61. This includes 33 Coronavirus cases confirmed by the audit committee. If 72 co-morbidity deaths are added, the tally shoots up to 133 but the state is not adding the co-morbidity fatalities, he said.
On April 24, the chief secretary had said the death audit committee had examined the deaths of 105 COVID-19 patients ever since it was set up on April 3. Of 105, COVID-19 was the cause of death of 33 patients. The rest of the 72 deaths were caused by co-morbidties and COVID-19 was only an “incidental” finding.
Addressing a press briefing, Sinha said, “We are quoting the right figure before you. (The 72) co-morbidity deaths will no more come to us because hospitals have been told not to report comorbidity deaths… So they are reporting the death figures and we are quoting the death figures. Where is the issue?”
On being asked about the two sets of death figures, Sinha said, “We were not giving two deaths figures. We were giving one death figure that is death due to COVID as given to us by the audit committee.”
Admitting that the state had not given its figures for the past three days, Rajiva Sinha attributed the reason for the same to the “very complicated” reporting structure.
“The cases that came up after we had put out a bulletin were sometimes not recorded even. It was not intentional,” the chief secretary insisted.
“The arrangement we had started, we thought it was fool proof but all arrangements should be dynamic and improved by our learning,” he was quoted as saying by NDTV, adding, “We have now tried to ensure no figures were lost in the cracks.”
Chief Secretary Rajiva Sinha also put the blame for faulty figures on private hospitals from where, he said, it was less easy to get real time basis data than from state hospitals. “This resulted in a gap in reporting,” he said.
The admission on discrepancies came after the members of the Inter-Ministerial Central Team (IMCT), which left for New Delhi on Monday morning, wrote a letter to Sinha asking the state government not to downplay the spread of the virus and to be transparent and consistent in reporting figures.
“The state needs to be transparent and consistent in reporting figures and not downplay the spread of coronavirus. The bulletins of May 1 and May 2 do not even mention the total number of cases and deaths in the state,” Apurva Chandra, Special Secretary to the Government of India, who was heading the central expert team, wrote in a letter.
Chandra further noted that while the state government has claimed very high level of daily surveillance of individuals in containment zones, no database was shown or results made available.
In his final observations, he wrote that West Bengal has the highest mortality rate in the country at 12.8 percent.
“This extremely high mortality rate is a clear indication of low testing, weak surveillance and tracking,” he said.
Further, the IMCT leader also lamented the Mamata Banerjee-led government’s “antagonistic view” to the COVID-19 monitoring team.
The COVID-19 monitoring team, led by Apurva Chandra, returned to the national capital after having completed two weeks of stay in the city.
The Centre had on April 20 deputed two IMCTs for West Bengal to make on-spot assessment of situation and issue necessary directions to state authorities for its redressal and submit their report to central government in larger interest of general public.
The Centre’s decision to send the team has triggered a big row, with the Trinamool Congress government of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee questioning the need for such a delegation.
Mamata had shot off a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday, describing the Centre’s decision as “unilateral”, and alleging it was sent without prior intimation, causing “breach of established protocol”.
She also dubbed the Union government’s selection of districts with ‘serious’ COVID-19 situation as a “figment of imagination”.