“The virus has not disappeared from Bengaluru yet, but it is definitely not spreading as fiercely as it did a few weeks ago,” Health Minister K Sudhakar told TOI, emphasizing that Bengaluru is running around 50,000 tests a day, most of them RT-PCR. (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction). While the city was reporting around 5,000 positive cases a day in early October, the number is now 2,400 cases.
Health officials said the positivity rate (number of cases that test positive per 100 tests) in Bengaluru dropped to 11.8% on Sunday from 24.1% in July, 13.3% in August and 12, 8% in September. In fact, Bengaluru’s positivity rate is the same as Chennai’s and much lower than Pune (24.3%) and Mumbai (17.6%).
Early treatment, access to health infrastructure.
The same goes for the case fatality rate (the number of deaths versus confirmed Covid cases), which has now dropped to 1.1% from 3.1% at the end of May and 1.8% in July. . The city, which used to report around 50 Covid deaths a day two weeks ago, has reported fewer than 25 deaths over the past three days.
The drop in the positivity rate and the case fatality rate has also sparked speculation about whether the Karnataka government is manipulating the data to show a drop in the number of reported cases every day or whether the government has deliberately reduced the evidence to show fewer positive cases.
Sudhakar, a qualified doctor, said: “When it comes to containing Covid, I have been thinking like a doctor, not like a minister. We doubled the number of tests in the last few days as our strategy is to stop the spread of infection early by testing more people. I have studied successful containment models, especially South Korea, and realized that the key to saving lives here is early testing and more testing. We are the only state that performs close to 1 lakh of RT-PCR tests per day. Early treatment and access to health infrastructure are working, so the numbers are decreasing. ”
He said that even contact tracing has become more effective as 7-8 contacts (both primary and secondary) of a Covid positive patient are currently tracked, isolated and treated. “We are identifying vulnerable groups and repeating tests on them to make sure they do not end up as propagators,” he added.
IAS officer Munish Moudgil, who heads the Karnataka state Covid-19 war room, said the reduction in cases is due to diligent and accelerated testing while monitoring other parameters.
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