New Delhi: India has now crossed the 10-lakh mark in Covid-19 cases. But what is more worrying perhaps is that there is a new high in deaths every day — 687 in the last 24 hours.
The only reason why the country’s case fatality ratio remains lower than the global average is the fact that it is also scaling new daily highs in cases every day. The positivity rate too remains consistently high, which indicates a need to expand testing even further.
In a letter to states Friday, Dr Balram Bhargava, Secretary, Health Research, wrote: “As a nation, everyone has risen to meet this challenge and this combined effort has led to a situation wherein everyday more than 3.20 lakh tests are carried out in the country and in all more than one Crore tests have been done.”
There are, however, wide disparities in the tests done by the states with high disease burden.
Number of deaths
India registered yet another daily high of 687 deaths in the last 24 hours. The government maintains that the case fatality rate at 18.6 deaths/million of the country is one of the lowest in the world.
Mortality rate
The fatality rate at this stage of the pandemic is a crucial marker of state governments’ preparedness, often ignored in the noise over numbers. This chart shows that three of the top five high burden states, Delhi, Maharashtra and Gujarat, also have a high fatality rate — a sure cause for worry.
Active cases
The number of active Covid-19 cases in the country currently stands at 3,42,756. Of these, less than 1.94% are in ICUs, 0.35% cases are on ventilators and 2.81% cases are on oxygen beds.
Daily tests
A total of 3,33,228 tests were carried out in the last 24 hours — this too is a daily high. In his letter, Dr Bhargava also wrote: “Key strategy to save lives and protect livelihoods remains ‘tests, track, treat’. Our continuous endeavor is to increase testing capacity and provide more and more access to people for testing.”
Positivity rate
The positivity rate that gives the count of samples that have come positive out of the total number tested is now over the 10% barrier — which is widely believed to indicate that the rate of testing is not keeping pace with the that of the spread of the disease.
Recovered cases
More than 6.35 lakh patients (63.33% of the total cases) have recovered so far. There are 1,383 dedicated Covid hospitals, 3,107 dedicated Covid healthcare centres, and 10,382 Covid case centres. Together, they have 46,673 ICU beds. As many as 21,848 ventilators are deployed across the country for Covid patients.
Total cases
The total cases have now crossed the 10-lakh mark. The government maintains that India, being the second most populous country in the world with 1.35 billion people, has 727.4 cases per million. On the global scale, cases/million population in India are 4 to 8 times less than some European countries.
High-burden states
Maharashtra has three of the top ten cities with 50 per cent cases in the country — Mumbai, Pune and Thane. There are also localised lockdowns happening, but the numbers are still telling — 8,641 in the last 24 hours.
Tamil Nadu is the state with the second highest disease burden, though the government believes it is not something that needs addressing but is a result of active case detected through a high number of tests. The state has the lower than national average mortality rate to show for that.
Delhi: In the last 24 hours, Delhi reported 1,652 new cases, taking the total to 1,18,645. Of the total tests conducted, 5,896 were done using RT-PCR/CBNAAT/TrueNAT while 14,329 were antigen tests.
Karnataka had been one of the better performing states until about three weeks ago, when it started slipping. While the state government has claimed that much of the spike is because of pending test results coming in, some parts of the state have also gone into a lockdown to control the situation.
Gujarat is fifth among the states with the highest disease burden. However, it is the worst in the country when it comes to case fatality ratio. It is still doing less tests per million than the national average.
Tests and positive cases
Between 44,186 tests in Tamil Nadu in the last 24 hours and just 11,444 in Gujarat, it is amply clear that testing numbers are widely varying. Delhi’s 20,225 comprises three quarters of antigen tests.