As daily cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in India continue to decline, states such as Kerala, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have bucked the national trend, data analyzed by HT shows. All of these four states have rapidly increasing case numbers, increasing positivity rates, and the last three also perform poorly.
To analyze the intensity of the outbreak and identify regions that still show characteristics of increasing outbreaks, HT analyzed data from the 20 most populous regions of India, looking for three factors: an increasing positivity rate, a high growth rate of daily cases and low tests. per million residents, who have marked all the hot spot regions globally.
With the beginning of the holiday season and the approach of winter, it becomes even more crucial that states across the country (and in particular states facing immediate danger of becoming the next hot spots) monitor infection rates for prevent the curve from rising again if people let their guard down during celebrations.
RATE OF NEW INFECTIONS
The rate of increase in cases for a region is generally measured by what is known as the doubling rate – the number of days it takes for the total number of infections in the region to double (the higher the number, the better). All the states analyzed have improved their doubling rate between September 1 and October 15, a statistic that is a reflection of how the national case curve has changed over the last month.
But Kerala, which has seen a massive increase in new cases during this period, not only has the worst doubling rate in the country (24 days to October 15), it is also the state that has improved the least (doubling rate improved for just one day). By context, the national average doubling rate is 74 days as of October 15, an improvement of 43 days from September 1.
Apart from Kerala, six states have fared worse than the average national doubling rate. At 37 days, Chhattisgarh has the second worst doubling rate followed by Madhya Pradesh (50 days), Rajasthan and Karnataka (53 days), West Bengal (57 days) and Odisha (69 days).
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Delhi’s 75-day doubling rate is slightly better than the national average, but is among the states with the least improvement (11 days). Only Kerala has improved less than the national capital. In early September, a similar analysis by HT found that Delhi had the highest doubling rate in the country (59 days).
POSITIVITY RATE AND TESTS
In six of the 20 states, the average positivity rate – the proportion of people who tested positive compared to those who were tested – increased in the past month. The higher the positivity rate for a region, the more widespread the virus will be. According to WHO recommendations, the positivity rate in a region that has a comprehensive testing program must be 5% or less for at least two weeks before the outbreak can be considered under control there.
Kerala comes back as the worst performing states, with 15.9% of all tests conducted in the last week coming back positive. The state’s seven-day average positivity rate has worsened by 8.4 percentage points since Sept. 1, again the highest increase in the country.
Maharashtra, which had been consistently reporting the highest positivity rate in the country for the past three months, has seen the figure drop by 7.3 percentage points (from 21.1% to 13.8%). The western state, which has the highest number of cases in the country, still has the second-highest proportion of tests that returned positive results in the last week.
Rajasthan saw the third highest positivity rate in the past week – 11.3%. For the week ending September 1, 6.1% of tests were positive in the state. In Madhya Pradesh, the positivity rate worsened 2 percentage points (from 5.7% on September 1 to 7.7% on October 15), while it worsened 1.6 percentage points in West Bengal (from 7% to 8 , 6%).
On average, 6.1% of all tests in the country came back positive in the last week.
Although the positivity rate has improved in the last 45 days in three states (Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh), all of them still have an average positivity rate during the last week higher than the national average: 9.5%, 8.9% and 6.4% respectively. .
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In terms of testing, Madhya Pradesh remains the worst performing state in the country, with 30,507 tests performed per million inhabitants, followed by West Bengal (39,844) versus the national average of 71,892. Rajasthan ranks third from the bottom (44,472 tests per million) followed by Chhattisgarh (51049 tests per million) and Uttar Pradesh (55,602).
Interestingly, Maharashtra’s testing rate (64,793 per million residents) has fallen below the national average, an alarming trend for a state with such a high case count and one that has the worst positivity rate in the country.
Meanwhile, Kerala had performed well on this front with 107,527 tests performed for every million residents in the state.
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