A six-month-old girl from Howrah and a 40-year-old woman from Kolkata died of dengue on Thursday.
Moumita Mukherjee of Kayasthapara in Kasba was admitted to a nursing home in Jodhpur Park on Monday after she tested positive for dengue.
Doctors said she was recovering well but her platelet count started falling all of a sudden.
She was shifted to the ICU on Wednesday night after her platelet count dropped below 30,000.
She passed away on Thursday after suffering a cardiac arrest.
Health department officials said 401 new dengue cases were detected in the state on Thursday, of which 315 were admitted to government hospitals.
“Relatively more number of cases are being reported from Kolkata, North 24-Parganas, Howrah, Hooghly, Murshidabad and Darjeeling,” said Siddharth Neogi, West Bengal’s director of health services.
In Howrah, Gulam Jarkani, the father of the six-month-old girl, said she had been suffering from mild fever and cough since August 22 and doctors recommended a blood test and X-ray as the fever was not subsiding. The child was shifted to the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital on September 2, after doctors realised it was a case of dengue and the condition could turn critical.
The child died late on Wednesday.
The doctors mentioned dengue as the cause of her death on the death certificate.
This was the second dengue death in the Bally municipal area in Howrah in three days, the last being that of 29-year-old Tausif Sardar of Ghusuri. He had died at a private hospital on Andul Road in Howrah on Tuesday following a “multi-organ dysfunction”.
The cause of death in Sardar’s death certificate mentions “dengue syndrome.” State urban development minister Firhad Hakim visited Bally on Wednesday and instructed officials to start visiting locked premises, including factories, and break open doors to spray larvicide.
Health department officials said they had stepped up tests for dengue and were in consultation with Kolkata Municipal Corporation officials to step up door-to-door campaign against accumulation of water.
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, the prime vector of the dengue virus, can breed in a pool of water that remains undisturbed for at least seven days.
Public health experts and entomologists are urging people to throw away water from containers at least once a week and clean one’s house to ensure there is no mosquito-breeding site.