58 more Covid-19 patients in Bengal ..... 24 people have been discharged in this period and there has been no addition to the death toll of 15

A family takes rest at a quarantine centre in Calcutta on Saturday. PTI

Meghdeep Bhattacharyya, TT, 24.04.20, Calcutta: The Bengal government said on Thursday that 58 new Covid-19 cases had been reported in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of active cases in the state to 334.

Twenty-four people have been discharged in this period after being declared coronavirus-free. There has been no addition to the death toll of 15. The total number of people cured in Bengal has now risen to 103.

Chief secretary Rajiva Sinha said of the 58 new cases, 22 were cases within families of already infected persons, while the remaining 36 were from various places. A total of 242 new cases have been reported over the past seven days.

“The new cases have come from the CMC (Calcutta Municipal Corporation) area, Howrah, North 24-Parganas, East Midnapore and Hooghly,” he said.

“The state still has nine districts — Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, North Dinajpur, South Dinajpur, Malda, Bankura, Birbhum, Purulia and Jhargram — with zero cases, completely green. There are 11 others with very few cases, in the orange zone,” Sinha added.

The chief secretary said 953 tests had been conducted in the state over the past 24 hours, taking the total number of tests to 7,990 in the 12 Centre-sanctioned laboratories in Bengal.

He said the 582 state-run quarantine centres had 15,784 people, of whom 11,089 had been released. The administration is still overseeing the home quarantine of 28,433 people.

Kit talks

The Mamata Banerjee government on Thursday said it had communicated to the Centre the difficulty faulty testing kits had caused the state amid the pandemic and urged the Narendra Modi government to take “well-thought-out” decisions.

Bengal chief secretary Rajiva Sinha said he had been speaking “continuously” to the Union healthy ministry and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) about such issues. “Last night, I spoke to ICMR’s (director-general) Balram Bhargava, when I raised this issue of faulty kits…,” Sinha said.

On Wednesday, he and the chief minister had held a news conference accusing the Centre and its agencies of trying to malign the state in the fight against the novel coronavirus. They had alleged that the ICMR had initially denied the state viral diagnostic kits and then supplied faulty antibody test kits.

Referring to the ICMR’s advisory to the states on Tuesday to stop using the rapid antibody test kits for the next two days till it had examined their quality following complaints that they were not fully effective, Sinha said he brought it up with Bhargava.

“I told Dr Balram Bhargava, this is causing a lot of problems for us. ‘You please, kindly, let us know your decisions — take your time, take a couple of days — after examining everything, at such a time’,” Sinha said.

“He (Bhargava) gave us his word that the deficit from their end, they will make up for it promptly. I will speak tonight to the Union health ministry. I am hoping that we will, somewhat, get help from them,” the chief secretary said.

“But, because our experience has not been good, we have made our own preparations already,” he added.