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India’s confirmed case count of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) surpassed the 26,000 mark on Saturday with the largest increase in infections in a single day, largely driven by Maharashtra and Gujarat, where the outbreak has been growing at a much more recent rate recently, even The rest of the country shows some improvement.
Based on HT’s analysis of the new daily cases reported by the states, the last 5,000 were reported in four days, one more day than it took for infections across the country to rise from 15,000 to 20,000. The national rate of duplication of infections was 9.1 days, federal officials said Saturday. For Gujarat and Maharashtra, this number was 4.3 and 6.7 days respectively, according to HT’s analysis of the numbers reported by the states.
The two regions together accounted for 1,067 of the 1,834 new cases on Saturday. Maharashtra only reported 811 new cases. Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra, registered an increase of 602 infections. Overall, 824 people have died of the disease across the country, an increase of 46 since Friday.
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Authorities said the overall growth in the number of cases in India has been linear, compared to other countries where it has been exponential. “It is difficult to say if the peak will come next month or later, but if you look at the graph it is quite linear. The case positivity rate has been around 4.5%, so we can safely say that we have managed to flatten the curve, “said Dr. Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and secretary of the health research department.
The positivity rate refers to the proportion of people who tested positive among all the individuals tested on a particular day. While officials and experts argue that this number suggests that India has been conducting tests adequately, the total number of tests conducted across the country is still only 420 per million inhabitants.
“It is not possible to stop an infectious disease, but what the blockade has done is delay the spread, and successfully,” said Dr. Jugal Kishore, a community medicine specialist at Safadrjung Hospital, Delhi.
According to ICMR data, about 40,000 tests conducted by the government and private laboratories across the country were performed on Friday.
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“This is the capacity if we work in a single shift, but it can be expanded to do almost double the amount of testing. We have enough test kits to test for at least eight weeks and ICMR is in the process of getting more. There is absolutely no shortage of kits or any other materials in the country that can make testing difficult. Everyone who needs evidence is being evaluated, ”said Dr. Raman R. Gangakhedkar, chief of the division of epidemiology and communicable diseases, ICMR.
According to government data, 5,209 people have recovered from the infection, bringing India’s overall recovery rate to 20.88%. Like on Friday, India’s death rate was 3.1%, which authorities say was lower than has been seen in several large countries. In the United States, for example, it is 5.6%.
In the national capital, which had the highest number of cases for several weeks when the outbreak began last month, 111 new cases were detected and one additional death was reported.
In Maharashtra, 22 new deaths were recorded on Saturday. In Gujarat, two teams from the Union government reached Ahmedabad and Surat, which were identified on Friday as particularly serious hot spots.
