TMC govt says it has retrieved ‘missing’ data, admits to gaps

KOLKATA: On a day the inter-ministerial central team sent a letter to the state government questioning mismatch in its data related to Covid-19, the Ma mat aB an erjee administration claimed to have found all missing data, even while admitting that there were gaps in data that was being released every day.

“There was an issue of missing data which is why there were some gaps. All missing data have been retrieved. Now we are in a position to share all this data every day,” Rajiva Sinha, chief secretary of West Bengal said on Monday.

A major controversy erupted after state health secretary Vivek Kumar’s letter to union health secretary Preeti Sudan put the total number of persons who tested positive for Covid-19 in the state at 931 as of April 30, whereas the data shared with journalists gave the number 816.

However, the data shared by the state on Monday supports neither figure. The government said that the total number of patients testing positive stood at 1,259 on Monday, with 229 new cases between May 1 and May 4, which put the April 30 number at 1,030.

“Bengal is turning out to be India’s Covid-19 hub. The state government’s mismanagement led to this situation. Without IMCT’s interventions, we would have never known the real picture regarding the number of deaths and persons infected,” BJP state unit president Dilip Ghosh alleged on Monday.