Days after former chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Devendra Fadnavis accused the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) of hiding the actual number of deaths of novel coronavirus patients in the city, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant on Monday praised the civic body for the Mumbai model of COVID-19 management.
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Mr. Kant tweeted, “Centralized bed allotment, anticipating oxygen storage facilities, common allotment of beds even in pvt hospitals, dashboards for monitoring, war rooms for patient follow up. Inspirational Mumbai model of Covid Mngmnt. Congrats @mybmc commissioner Chahal & his Gr8 team.”
The Congress was quick to react. “Mr. Fadnavis had to hear the truth from the horse’s mouth. After the Prime Minister, now the NITI Aayog CEO too has told him the truth. This is the reality that he should realise,” Maharashtra Congress general secretary Sachin Sawant said.
Last week, Mr. Fadnavis wrote to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray alleging that the BMC was suppressing the actual fatality figure by putting a number of deaths in the category of ‘death due to other reason’ than COVID-19.
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The civic body strongly objected to the allegations and said it followed the directives issued by the WHO and ICMR. “The BMC has not fixed the criteria for categorising deaths into those due to COVID-19 and those due to other reasons. Those are fixed by the Central government and ICMR,” the civic body said.
It further said that informing about co-morbidities of a dead person did not mean their reason for death was being suppressed. It also said that the civic body had been following the ICMR’s directions of 70:30 testing ratio in which 70% were RT-PCR while the rest were antigen tests.
A day after the letter was sent, Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the State government for its effective fight against the pandemic. On Sunday, at a meeting of BJP workers, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari advised Mr. Fadnavis and other State BJP workers to avoid politics in the times of COVID-19.