Samajwadi Party legislator Rais Shaikh has written to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray opposing the BMC’s decision to prioritise only symptomatic people for testing while leaving out asymptomatic ones.
The BMC recently took a decision to prioritise testing wherein only symptomatic people, including those from among high-risk contacts, will be tested for COVID-19. Asymptomatic people are a second priority right now as the BMC is trying to reduce the load on its labs.
Mr. Shaikh, in a letter to the CM on Wednesday, said the State had degraded testing protocols by excluding high-risk asymptomatic contacts.
“Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai has done many flip-flops on testing protocols with new circulars every couple of days and the latest revised circular of 12th April 2020 reflects high level of inconsistency in testing policies,” the letter said.
According to him, this is the State’s biggest mistake as most countries and States which were able to control the spread of the virus adopted aggressive testing protocols.
“Even ICMR has now recommended that to control situation, we need to go for more testing as its impossible keep check on home quarantines. Hence, I urgently call upon you to please revise testing protocols and go for more and more testing for even asymptomatic cases. ICMR has imported more kits and as per my understanding from press reports, that all States are going to get Rapid kits, RT-PCR kits etc. in enough volumes to test all suspects including contact tracing,” Mr. Shaikh’s letter said.
He has also demanded more dedicated ICU beds in Mumbai.
