ICMR-NICED provided defective Covid-19 test kits causing delay: Mamata's health dept hits back

Amid severe criticism of its handling of the Covid-19 situation that is worsening in the state fast with the Mamata government being accused of suppressing the real figures, the latter hit back by posting a series of tweets on its health department Twitter account. 

West Bengal Health and Family Welfare department claimed that it was having to rerun tests for confirmation because of the faulty test kits supplied by the ICMR-NICED causing delay in generating results.

"Apropos a mischievous report circulating in social media about the alleged delay in the time taken for testing swab samples in West Bengal, it is clarified that: the testing kits supplied by ICMR-NICED about two weeks ago have started to throw up a large number of ‘inconclusive’ results, necessitating a repeat/ ‘confirmatory’ test run, thereby causing a delay in the generation of the final test report," state health department wrote on Twitter days after the accusation.

"There was no problem earlier when the testing kits were being received directly from National Institute of Virology, Pune. Recently, the supplies to Government Labs in West Bengal have been routed through ICMR-NICED, Kolkata," it wrote on the micro-blogging site.

"This problem has been faced not just by Government labs in the State but other testing labs in the country, based on their feedback shared in the relevant user groups," it said.

"The apparently defective test kits supplied by ICMR-NICED, Kolkata are resulting in a high number of repeat/ confirmatory tests and causing delays and other attendant problems at a time when we are battling a pandemic," Bengal health department tweet claimed.

"This is an issue that ICMR needs to look into immediately," it said.

No reaction, however, has been received so far from the officials of ICMR-NICED on this matter since the tweets were posted around 8 pm in the evening.

Last week, ICMR-NICED director Shanta Dutta claimed that their infrastructure was better than any other lab in the state and confirmed that there was no shortage of Covid-19 test kits in West Bengal.

"We have bigger infrastructure than any other medical college in the state and manpower in our regional Virus Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (VRDL) is enough," Shanta Dutta had said. 

The Left parties have already hit the street demanding actual Covid-19 figures and alleging improper distribution and black-marketing of ration supplies,

The opposition BJP leaders have also started slamming the government even as social media posts and whatsapp messages of scary scenarios and misery of families and people hit by the virus were doing the rounds.