In South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, a private firm GCC Biotech India has claimed to have developed an indigenous real-time COVID-19 test kit costing about 500 rupees per kit. This could prove to be extremely beneficial for a state that has been plagued by the virus for a while now.
According to the authorities, West Bengal has recently witnessed eleven more deaths due to coronavirus disease Covid-19 which has raised the death toll in the state to 99. At least 108 more people have tested positive for the virus in the state, which takes the number of confirmed cases to 1,786 according to the Home Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay. The state so far has recorded 527 new cases and 38 deaths in the past seven days.
Thirteen of West Bengal’s 23 districts have reported new cases of Covid-19 in the past week, and the worst affected city is Kolkata. It is mainly because of the population in the city with people living in cramped up spaces trying to maintain social distancing. Overall around 911 people have been tested positive in Kolkata, 116 of have them died, with 64 deaths attributed to Covid-19 and 52 to co-morbidity. This situation can prove to be particularly grievous as the situation is most critical in boroughs number 1 to 9 sprawling across north and central Kolkata and parts of south Kolkata, and borough no 15 in western Kolkata, covering mostly the Garden Reach area. Of the total 326 containment zones in the city, 255 are between wards no 1 and 90 of the total 144-ward Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
The Centre had recently criticized the state government over its Covid-19 management stating that the state was not testing enough. West Bengal has been characterised by a very low rate of testing in proportion to the population, and the highest mortality rate in the country of 13.2 per cent. The state government in its defence, however, stated that less number of active cases was detected in the initial days due to lack of infrastructure. This resulted in an apparently high rate of deaths in the state.
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