Coronavirus Numbers in India: Covid-19 Cases, Deaths, Recoveries

Prabhu Shisharnappa Banshette, 37, provides transportation to citizens, including Covid-19 patients, wearing personal protective equipment in Pune. (Express photo: Pavan Khengre)

Coronavirus cases in India: Daily detection of new positive coronavirus cases fell below 80,000 on Friday, only the fourth time this has occurred in the past month. But on previous occasions, this drop had occurred on a Monday and was attributable to low test numbers on a Sunday. Friday’s count of around 79,000 new cases is therefore the lowest since Sept. 1, which is not a direct result of the previous day’s reduction in testing.

One reason for India’s relatively low coronavirus numbers in recent days has been the decline in Maharashtra. There has been a significant reduction in the number of cases reported by Maharashtra compared to two weeks ago, when it had been reporting more than 22,000 cases daily. It has dropped to a level of 15,000 to 18,000, and that is also reflected in the daily national count. Importantly, it has kept India’s number well below the peak of approximately 98,000 cases achieved in the second week of September.

A look at active Covid-19 cases in India and Maharashtra.

Of course, the decline in Andhra Pradesh, the second highest contributor until two weeks ago, has also helped. But Maharashtra’s influence on the Indian figures is not new. At one point, the state accounted for as much as 40 percent of India’s total case load. That number has dropped to less than 22 percent now. But India’s growth curve is still largely influenced by the way Maharashtra reports its numbers. In fact, the case histories of India and Maharashtra are very similar to each other.

As of September, new daily detections in Maharashtra had spiked sharply, from around 12,000 to more than 22,000 in less than 10 days. During this time, active cases in the state jumped from two lakh to three lakh. After spending some time in that area, the daily numbers seem to have dropped as fast as they had risen. As a result, active cases have dropped to less than 2.6 lakh now.

Neither the sudden increase nor the subsequent decline in population in Maharashtra is very well explained. However, it appears that Pune was doing to Maharashtra what Maharashtra was doing to India. In September, Pune emerged as the city with the highest number of cases in the country. Her new daily cases rose to 6,000 a day. Even states with a large number of cases do not report that many cases in a single day. Fortunately, the city has slowed down a bit since then, and the daily numbers have dropped to less than 3,000 now. Still, apart from Delhi, no other city reports as many cases as Pune is doing right now. The city’s total case burden is set to cross the three lakh mark on Saturday. Only the five most affected states have more cases.

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Covid-19 cases from India.

Meanwhile, daily recoveries across the country have also dropped significantly in recent days. Recoveries have now become less than the detection of new cases. This is not very surprising. Recoveries follow new detections for 10-14 days. Since there has been a drop in the discovery of new cases, recoveries were also scheduled to decline after a few days. But meanwhile, active cases have dropped by about 70,000 in the past two weeks. It has started to rise again, but more slowly than before.

The death count in India crossed the 1 lakh mark. Only the United States and Brazil have recorded more coronavirus-related deaths. More than 2.12 lakh people in the United States and about 1.45 lakh in Brazil have died from the disease so far. In India, the peak deaths have occurred in Maharashtra, which accounts for nearly 40 percent of all deaths in the country.

India now represents about ten percent of all the deaths that have occurred around the world. Each day, it contributes between 15 and 25 percent of the deaths reported worldwide.

The top ten states with the maximum case load:

The number of people who have so far been infected with the disease has reached 64.73 lakh, of which 54.27 lakh, or about 84 percent, have already recovered.

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