October is the holiday season in India, but there is one more reason to celebrate this year: the end of the first wave of the coronavirus disease.
It’s evident in one of the charts accompanying this 176th installment of Dispatch: a return from the seven-day average of daily cases to levels last seen in early September.
The reasons for this are unclear, and the pattern of daily case numbers is still too volatile for my liking, but the downward slope of the curve is clearly there to see. Inadequate testing does not appear to have caused this – the average of seven days of testing performed every day has continued to rise, although a more detailed analysis of the gap between RT-PCR and rapid antigen testing is needed before this can be conclusive . He said.
There has also been a slight drop in the number of daily deaths and a significant drop in the seven-day average positivity rate (number of people who tested positive expressed as a percentage of the number who were tested).
This is the first time that the number of Covid-19 cases, both daily and on a seven-day average, has steadily decreased for at least fifteen days, perhaps more. Other countries have seen clear first waves (the United States has also seen a second and is now in the third), but not India so far. In late August and September, as cases rose, some experts erroneously referred to it as the second wave in the country, but as can be seen from the graph mentioned in the first instance, it was simply a continuation of the same curve upward. That has changed: Since the third week of September, the seven-day average of daily cases has been trending downward. And this, even after taking into account the factor of Monday (the number of cases usually suffers a drop due to the few tests carried out during the weekend). On October 5 there were 59,980; on September 28, 69,685; on September 21, 74,693; on September 14, 81,801; on September 7 it was 77,816; on August 31, 67,484; and on August 24, 59,051. The pattern is clear.
And so, to repeat what I said at the beginning of this column, it is time to celebrate, cautiously, in a socially detached way, and with the full awareness that the curve could go back to the north and things to the south. After all, both in the United States and in European countries like France and Spain, the second wave was stronger than the first in terms of the number of daily cases, although the deaths were far fewer.
For much of the first wave, Delhi, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu accounted for a significant proportion of infections in the country, although that has changed in recent months.
Among these, the trajectory of the pandemic in Delhi shows that the Capital has seen two waves and that in Maharashtra it shows that the western state, the most affected by the coronavirus disease in the country, may be seeing the end of its first wave. Maharashtra’s positivity rate is still a bit too high (a seven-day average of 18.7% on Monday) to say this for sure, but even that number is at least eight percentage points off its recent peaks, indicating some kind of change.
However, Tamil Nadu presents an interesting study. The number of cases in the state has been on a long (and high) plateau since early August, it is unclear why, although its positivity rate appears to be well controlled. The tests in Delhi and Maharashtra appear to have decreased somewhat, while Tamil Nadu remains an outlier (positive).
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