Jalangi MLA Abdur Razzak Mandal on Wednesday tested positive in a Covid-19 rapid antigen test conducted on Bengal Assembly premises where chief minister Mamata Banerjee was present with many of her cabinet colleagues and hundreds of legislators, staff members and journalists.

Mandal was not factored in the 3,107 new Covid-19 cases found in Bengal, over 24 hours till Wednesday 9am, as testing on Assembly premises only began then. Of the 195 persons tested on Wednesday in the Assembly, Mandal and a security guard assigned to him tested positive.

“The Assembly premises and the MLA hostel (where Mandal had gone) would be thoroughly sanitised. Those found positive underwent the rapid test and would have more testing during treatment,” said a senior member of the treasury benches. Mandal, 62, is part of over 20 members of the Assembly who have so far been infected.

The session, limited to 45 minutes on Wednesday, had to be convened despite the pandemic because of a constitutional stipulation of the House meeting at least once in six months. Mamata was present for 15 minutes in the sanitised and socially-distanced House before leaving for the state secretariat.

“We carried out a quick contact-tracing. Mandal hadn’t been in close proximity to the chief minister...,” the source from the treasury benches said.

On Wednesday, Bengal also reported 2,967 recoveries and 53 deaths. The total case count now is over 1.9 lakh, of which nearly 1.63 lakh are recoveries, besides 3,730 deaths. . Of the 53 casualties, 17 persons succumbed in Calcutta and 10 in North 24-Parganas.

As of Wednesday, the state government reported comorbid 3,211 or 86.1 per cent of deaths. Bengal’s mortality rate is 1.96, still behind the national rate of 1.69 per cent. But its recovery rate is 85.76, substantially higher than the 77.78 per cent national rate.

On Tuesday, a gardener, a cop, a journalist and the driver of MLA Sujan Chakraborty tested positive in the Assembly.

Mandal, still a Congress-backed CPM MLA from Murshidabad’s Jalangi on paper, who defected to the ruling Trinamul Congress last year, was awaiting his test results before entering the House when he was informed. On learning he was positive, Mandal went to the MLA hostel on Kyd Street, from where he was asked by Speaker Biman Banerjee to go on institutional isolation in a state-run safe home.

In Bengal, the pandemic has infected ministers Jyotipriya Mullick, Sujit Bose, Swapan Debnath and Soumen Mahapatra, and claimed the lives of CPM veteran and former transport minister Shyamal Chakraborty, Trinamul MLAs Samaresh Das and Tamonash Ghosh.

The state logged 42,642 tests on Wednesday, which took the total to nearly 22.86 lakh, at 25,399 tests per million people.

Steady rise in testing, coupled with relatively lower cases being found improved the positive confirmation rate after August 23, from 8.9 to 8.31 per cent. A decreasing positive confirmation rate is indicative of reducing levels of Covid-19 spread.