Updated: October 9, 2020 2:39:06 pm
Passengers wearing protective masks queue on a platform to get tested for coronavirus disease at New Delhi’s Nizamuddin train station. (Express photo by Amit Mehra)
Sustained drops in the daily number of new coronavirus infections have caused active cases in the country to drop below nine lakh now. As of mid-September, there were more than 10.17 lakh of active cases.
About 20 percent of this reduction in active cases can be attributed to the nearly 23,000 deaths that occurred during this period. The remaining 80 percent is a consequence of the drop in new cases that are detected every day, so that these have been lower than the number of people who recover from the disease.
On Thursday, for example, there were only around 70,000 new detections, while more than 78,000 people were declared to have been recovered. Thursday’s count of 70,496 was the lowest in the country since early September, except for this Monday when only 61,000 new cases were detected, mainly due to low tests on Sunday.
Top 10 states with maximum case load.
A big contributor to Thursday’s low count was Kerala, where the numbers suddenly fell to almost half the previous day. On Wednesday alone, Kerala recorded its highest daily number, crossing 10,000 cases in a single day for the first time. However, on Thursday, this number dropped to less than 5,500. Kerala, which is the fastest growing state in the country right now, has been reporting between 7,000 and 9,000 new cases every day for the past two weeks.
But on Thursday, for the first time in about three weeks, Kerala had more recoveries than new cases. More than 7,000 people were declared to have recovered from the disease on Thursday.
Major cities with peak cases.
Meanwhile, the East Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh has become the first non-metropolitan and non-level I city to record more than a lakh of cases of coronavirus infections. The East Godavari district, which comprises the cities of Kakinada and Rajamundhry, has long contributed the largest number of cases in the state. But like the rest of the state, which has slowed considerably in the last two weeks, the number of new cases has also steadily declined in eastern Godavari. It now consistently reports fewer than 1,000 cases a day and, on Thursday, this number fell to 652, which was the lowest since the last week of July.
The city of Thane has also reached a milestone. It is now the fifth city in the country to record more than two lakh of coronavirus cases. Not surprisingly, three of these five cities are in Maharashtra (Pune, Mumbai, and Thane), while the other two are Delhi and Bengaluru.
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Delhi crossed the three lakh mark on Thursday. Only Pune has more cases.
So far, more than 69 lakhs of people in the country have been infected with the virus at one time or another, of which more than 59 lakh, or more than 85 percent, have recovered from the disease. More than 1.06 lakh people have died from the disease so far.
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