PM’s praise follows war of words on Covid-19 handling
The state BJP, it seems, is not ready to accept appreciation by the Supreme Court and praise by Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the handling of the Corona pandemic in Mumbai and the rest of Maharashtra. On Saturday it led to another war of words between the Opposition and the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA).
Devendra Fadnavis, Leader of Opposition in the State Assembly, in a letter to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, claimed some figures of Coronavirus-related deaths were being fudged to show the state performance in good stead. The state should stop fudging figures of Covid deaths and window dressing about infection rate, demanded the leader after a few hours a news came that PM Modi had a telephonic conversation with CM Thackeray and praised the state for putting up a good fight against the pandemic.
Fadnavis’s contention was that the state was violating the guidelines formulated by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Every death of Covid positive patient is to be reported as the Covid death. And the only exception to this is deaths due to accident, suicide, murder or in extreme cases like death of Covid positive brain-dead patient or 4th stage cancer
patient which, according to Fadnavis, despite being Covid positive is to be registered under column death due to other reasons.
He alleged that the BMC was misusing the category to show maximum deaths due to other reasons. Such data is bigger than the rest of Maharashtra, says the letter by Fadnavis along with figures reported recently. He attached figures from March 2020 to April 30, 2021, to show further elaborate the percentage shown. He also alleged BMC resorted to low testing which leads to bringing down the infection ratio artificially.
Soon after he posted the letter on Twitter, Congress spokesman Sachin Sawant presented another data saying Fadnavis should have been happy about the SC’s praise on Mumbai but it seems he is having a stomach ache. He said the second wave started on February 10 and there were cumulative 3.13 lakh patients and 11,400 deaths in Mumbai. Today, there have been cumulative 6,71 lakh patients and 13,687 deaths, which means 2287 deaths in 3 months.