Due to non-cooperation of Mamata Banerjee government in Kolkata, the Centre is planning to gain direct access to all case details in West Bengal without waiting for the state government’s response.
The ICMR and NIC has developed the RT-PCR app as a tool for medical staff across the country who are collecting samples to send them to ICMR and get rapid test results.
With this mobile app, the Centre plans to gain access to all coronavirus cases in West Bengal which were till now being monitored by the state government who shared minimum details with the Centre.
The central teams that were visiting Bengal to monitor the coronavirus situation and handling of the lockdown had accused the Mamata government of showing discrepancies with the number of cases and deaths. The teams also accused the government of not being transparent.
Till now, most of the data was being shared manually. Even files and reports were being sent from districts to Kolkata headquarters in paper format.
With this mobile app, medical workers will enter data of coronavirus cases and suspected cases directly on the application for both the state and central governments to look at.
The RT-PCR app enables data entry in real time and also shares updates on reports — both negative and positive — with both the Centre and state governments at the same time.
The government is now making the app are available to medical workers collecting samples and handling coronavirus cases in remote areas or even state headquarters.
Last week, West Bengal diluted the expert committee that was studying and certifying coronavirus deaths. A written notification on this move is still awaited.
Dr. Girish Chandra Bera, Chief Medical Officer of Health of Paschim Medinipur or West Midnapore district said, “This app will help our sample collectors as well as the people. This will help in getting the test results as well. Both the governments are connected with this app.”
“Soon there will be house visits in the containment zones and if we think a person must go through a test then we will test him/her and data entry will be made accordingly,” the CMO said.
The medical workers deployed on field have been asked to get a complete idea of the app with proper training sessions for health department officials and frontline workers.
Panchanan Kundu, Principal Midnapur Medical College who has been a corona warrior himself said, “As many migrant labourers and students are returning home, we have to increase the testing. Testing capacity has been increased to 200 per day. If the new app is installed, we can expand this to 300. The app will assign an ID to the patients and afterwards when the results come in, it will show on the app.”
He also said, “This step has been taken by the Bengal government along with the health department.”
But there is more to it than what meets the eye. There is a rise in coronavirus cases on ground which has not reflected in a similar way in the records of Bengal. A highly placed official in the Mamata Banerjee government said on condition of anonymity, “There has to be a sync in the data on ground and data reflecting in government records. A considerable difference was the reason of questions being raised by the Centre. So finally there is a common platform for both the stakeholders for both the governments to look at the official records.”
There has been a sudden increase in positive coronavirus cases after the arrival of trains full of migrant labourers in the past few days.
Dr. Girish Chandra Bera said, “We are thinking about to introducing more labs in the districts which will help to collect more samples to identify the asymptomatic cases as well. As of now, we have only one lab, which is the Medinipur medical college. These additional centres will collect the samples but the testing will be done only in Medinipur medical college. Six collection centres are ready and 8 centres will start soon.”