BJP lawmaker tests negative and positive

LUCKNOW: A perplexed lawmaker of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh (UP) took to social media to express his discomfiture after two different samples of his – one collected by a government sample collection team and the other by a private lab – gave two different results.

“Akhir kab tak (till when?)” Jata Shankar Tripathi, BJP MLA from Khadda, Kushinagar, wrote on Twitter, while tagging the post to a fellow party lawmaker Dr Radhamohan Das Agarwal, who is also a practising doctor in Gorakhpur, Abhishek Kaushik, the officer on special duty (OSD) to UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath and a few others.

“Since those different reports on the same day, I have been unable to decide whether I am positive or if I have recovered?” the ruling party lawmaker said on phone from Kushinagar.

Four BJP MLAs have died of Covid-19 infection in the last 15 days in the state. In all 13 MLAs of different parties have succumbed since March 2020, when the first Covid-19 case was reported.

“I tested positive on April 18. After 12 days of home isolation and treatment after consulting a doctor at a private hospital in Delhi, who also happens to be my relative, I scheduled a repeat test on April 29. My sample was collected and when I didn’t get a report for five days, I scheduled another test on May 3. This time, both lab technicians from the health department collected my sample and the same private lab people too came for a re-test,” the MLA said.

“I was confident I would have tested negative. But, I was shocked when the report from the health department, including RT-PCR and rapid antigen, said I was Covid-19 negative, but the one from the private lab said that I was positive. What’s more, my report of April 29 which this private lab had misplaced also came. This said I was negative. Now, this has confused me completely for it means in a week’s time I have tested negative thrice, positive once,” the MLA said.

“You can well imagine the confusion because of such tests,” said Rajesh Mani, who is close to the BJP MLA.

In April, the state government had asked four private laboratories to stop doing Covid-19 tests after a health department team found anomalies during an inspection.

The state government has also moderated the fees charged by private labs for Covid testing. In March, 2020, private laboratories charged Rs 4,500 per RT-PCR test sample collected from home. The same was scaled down to Rs 2,500.

“The fees was further slashed to Rs 1,500 and subsequently revised to Rs 900 (home collection) and Rs 700 (sample given at lab).