Bengal to write to Centre for more Covid vaccines, testing kits: Official

The West Bengal government on Wednesday decided to write to the Centre to request for more COVID vaccines and testing kits, a senior official said.

Along with five lakh doses of nasal vaccines, the state government has decided to request the Union government to send one lakh doses of Covaxin and 15 lakh doses of Covishield, he said.

Keeping in mind the warnings of a probable COVID surge, the state government issued guidelines for hospitals and directed them to set up COVID wards in medical establishments where such facilities are unavailable.

The decisions were taken during a virtual meeting chaired by Chief secretary H K Dwivedi with the district magistrates and senior officials of the state health department.

The official said that hospitals were asked to keep beds ready keeping in mind critical and very critical patients.

Meanwhile, nine fresh cases were reported in the state on Wednesday, taking the tally to 21,18,606, a health bulletin said.

The toll remained unchanged at 21,532 as no fresh fatalities were reported.

The number of active cases rose to 58 as four more people were cured of the disease, taking the total number of recoveries to 20,97,016.

A total of 4,652 samples were tested in the last 24 hours, it added.