Mumbai’s Covid-19 cases are plateauing, but city needs more tests experts say

Are Covid-19 cases in Mumbai plateauing? In the past 10 days, Mumbai has, in descending order of dates from July 5, recorded 1,287, 1,163, 1,338, 1,554, 1,487, 893,

Are Covid-19 cases in Mumbai plateauing? In the past 10 days, Mumbai has, in descending order of dates from July 5, recorded 1,287, 1,163, 1,338, 1,554, 1,487, 893, 1,226, 1,287, 1,402 and 1,297 cases, averaging 1,293 cases per day. This number was 1,275 for the week ending June 27, and 1,214 the week ending June 20. In the three weeks before that, Mumbai recorded 1354, 1273 and 1375 new cases every day at an average.

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Since June 15, the city has not recorded major spikes in the pandemic curve. In this backdrop, Maharashtra health officials believe that Covid-19 has hit a plateau in Mumbai.

However, that is not the case for the rest of Maharashtra. If we break the 200,000-case march of Covid in the state (Maharashtra breached the grim figure on July 4) into four phases of 50,000 cases each, an alarming trend of the increasing pace of cases emerges. The first 50,000 cases in Maharashtra took 77 days (on May 24) from the first case reported in the state on March 9, while the next 50,000 came in the next 19 days on June 12. The state crossed 150,000 cases just two weeks later on June 26. The 200,000-case mark came in just eight days later.

In the last week, Maharashtra reported 5,847 new cases every day at an average – the highest ever recorded. The week before, this number was 4,418, and it was 3,376 the week before, all record highs until that point of time. In fact, the average new case graph has been increasing every day for nearly a month.

Another case of worry for Maharashtra is the rise in active cases. In the last week, the state has added nearly 15,700 active cases. The week before that, active cases in the state increased a little over 9,500. Active cases is a crucial metric because it directly reflects the load on any region’s healthcare system. As of July 5, there are 86,040 active cases in the state. On June 25, there were 63,342. Recovery rate improved marginally from 52.42% to 54.08% in the same period.

Mumbai, however, appears to have hit a plateau, in both daily cases as well as active cases. As of July 5, Mumbai’s active cases stood at 23,732. The city had recorded 55,884 recoveries out of 84,524 cumulative cases, giving a recovery rate of 66.12%. In contrast, on June 25, Mumbai’s active cases stood at 27,659, with 39,149 recoveries out of a total of 70,878 cases. The recovery rate in Mumbai was 55.23%. Since then, the recovery rate in Mumbai has risen by 10.89 percentage points, and the active cases have dropped by 14.2%.

This is not enough to put Mumbai in the clear, though, according to Dr Abhijit More, co-convenor of Jan Arogya Abhiyaan, a pan-Maharashtra health sector NGO. He says testing in Mumbai has been inadequate. “The number of tests has remained constant between 4,000 and 4,500. The identification of cases has therefore maintained a similar path. If the civic-body starts testing more, the pandemic curve will go up, rather than remaining constant,” he said.

From June 25 to July 3, Mumbai averaged 5025 tests a day, but from June 1 to June 24, it had averaged 4,298 tests.

However, Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of the state Covid-19 task force refutes More’s claim.

Citing data, Joshi said when BMC was testing between 2,500 and 4,000 people every day in April, the positivity rate was higher. For example, on April 28, when the city recorded its highest one-day spike with 2,105 cases, the BMC tested 4,093 people, giving a positivity rate of 51.43%.

“In the last week of May, when we recorded the highest spike in cases, our testing figure was between 3,500 and 4,500 samples. Despite increasing the number of tests in June and July, the pandemic curve hasn’t gone up. It has rather plateaued,” Dr Joshi said.

Public health experts said the plateauing is not uniform across the city. Cases seem to have plateaued only in south Mumbai, they said, where some locations had recorded the highest number of Covid-19 cases, whereas numbers are gradually increasing in north Mumbai, especially in the western suburbs.

Dr Sanjay Pattiwar, a public health expert and analyst, said. “G-North ward, which has India’s largest slum cluster of Dharavi, was BMC’s prime concern. Now, we are recording very few cases there. The curve has flattened in Dharavi, but the situation is the opposite in Borivali, Dahisar and Kandivali.”