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Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, May 7
As India reported 52,952 coronavirus cases on Thursday, with 1,783 deaths and 15,266 recoveries, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said COVID mortality in India was the lowest in the world.
Pointing to the challenges in the COVID response at a time when the disease chart has reached a gradual peak rather than retreating, as the government expected in the midst of the shutdown, Vardhan said the challenge was to prevent the disease from reaching the districts unaffected.
There are currently 319 unaffected districts in the green zone, 130 red and 284 orange districts.
Vardhan said India’s mortality from COVID was 3.3 percent, the lowest globally.
He also noted that the satisfactory signal was an ever-improving recovery rate that should give people the confidence to report symptoms and seek care.
About 28.8 percent of all COVID patients have recovered and gone home, the minister said.
Another “satisfactory” development that he noticed was less severity of the disease, considering that only 1.1 percent of all COVID patients are on ventilators, 3.3 percent on medical oxygen, and 4.8 percent on ICU beds.
In absolute numbers, this means that only 582 of India’s 52,952 COVID patients are on ventilators; 17.47 in oxygen support and 2.541 in ICU beds.
India’s doubling rate calculated today from trends for the past 14 days is 10.6, while trends for the past seven days show a doubling rate of 10.2 days.
However, more and more districts, Vardhan said, were now managing to extend the reporting period for new infections, with 180 caseless districts between seven and 13 days; 164 districts without case between 14 and 20 days and 136 districts without case between 21 and 28 days.
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