BMC suppressing COVID-19 death toll and infection rate in Mumbai, alleges BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis

File Photo

New Delhi: BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis on Saturday (May 8) alleged that Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is suppressing COVID-19 death count and "manipulating" the infection rate in Mumbai.

Fadnavis in a letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said that the Shiv Sena-controlled civic body is classifying deaths of some COVID-19 patients to ‘other reasons’, thus underreporting the real toll caused by the deadly infection. 

“The 'death due to other reasons' category has to be used only in exceptional cases, like when a COVID-19 patient commits suicide, dies in an accident, is murdered, is brain-dead or a fourth-stage cancer patient," PTI quoted the former CM as saying. 

BMC reported deaths of 683 COVID-19 patients under this "suspicious category" of ‘death due to other reasons’ between February to April, he added. 

Fadnavis said, “This accounted for 39.4 per cent of total 1,773 deaths reported in the city during the period. In the same period, at least 15,958 people died in the rest of the state and of these, 119 were shown as `death due to other reasons', which is 0.7 per cent.” 

Further attacking the BMC, he claimed that the civic body was manipulating the infection rate by preferring Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) which are only 50 per cent effective. 

"The city has the capacity to conduct one lakh RT-PCR tests per day, but the average of last 10 days is 34,191. Out of it, 30 per cent are Rapid Antigen Tests. On May 7, 45,726 tests were conducted, of which 14,480 (31.67 per cent) were RAT, due to which the infection rate was 7.6 per cent in Mumbai," Fadnavis said.

"However, on May 3 the BMC had conducted 26,586 tests of which 4,453 (17 per cent) were RAT which resulted in infection rate of 11.3 per cent,” he claimed. 

Earlier, the Supreme court had praised the Mumbai civic body for managing the second wave of the coronavirus efficiently.

The total tally in Mumbai as of Friday was 6,71,394 while the death toll stood at 13,687, as per BMC data. 

On Saturday, the caseload in Maharashtra breached the 50 lakh-mark (50,53,336) with 53,605 new cases. The death toll climbed to 75,277 as 864 people succumbed to the infection, the state health department official said. 

(With PTI inputs)