Devendra Fadnavis, Leader of the Opposition, speaking about the decrease in cases of coronavirus in Mumbai, stated that the reason the city was reporting a low number of cases is because the BMC and the state government is not testing enough.
Fadnavis, speaking to a news channel, further questioned why the death rate in the city remains so high if the people testing positive for the disease have decreased. He added that Mumbai has a capacity of conducting 12,000 cases in a day whereas approximately only 5,000 tests are being conducted. The former CM also opined that the only way Mumbai can come out victorious in this pandemic if a second wave of the coronavirus does not hit the city.
Earlier in the week, the Senior BJP leader had appealed to the Maharashtra government to do away with rapid antigen tests to detect cases of coronavirus and to only rely on RT-PCR tests, which are known for maximum accuracy.
In a letter to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, Fadnavis stated that the previous experience of conducting rapid antigen tests in Mumbai was not good. He added that 65 per cent results of the antigen tests conducted in two Mumbai-based laboratories between July 18 and 21 and had come out negative, while the same suspects tested positive for the infection in their RT-PCR tests.
Furthermore, he demanded that the state government release daily figures of antigen tests and PT-PCR separately for better transparency.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra has reported 9,509 fresh cases of the coronavirus in the past 24 hours, taking the tally of confirmed cases to 4,41,228, according to the state health department. In the city of Mumbai, 1,105 new cases of the coronavirus were reported as 49 people succumbed to the disease.
On the other hand, the total number of cases in neighbouring Thane district touched 96,120, of which it has 31,929 active cases. The tally of active cases in Palghar stands at 6,187 while it is 3,362 in Nagpur.
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