Maharashtra sees highest single-day Covid spike since September 17

The state on Wednesday clocked 23,179 new cases— the highest in 181 days. The state had reached its peak on September 11 last year, with 24,886 cases.

A day after the Maharashtra government admitted that it was witnessing a second wave of Covid-19 infections, the state saw its highest single-day spike since September 17, 2020.

(Bhushan Koyande/HT)

The state on Wednesday clocked 23,179 new cases— the highest in 181 days. The state had reached its peak on September 11 last year, with 24,886 cases. Maharashtra has breached the 20,000-mark 16 times since the pandemic broke out in March 2020, of which, it surpassed the 23,000-mark six times, data showed.

The state’s total tally rose to 2,370,507, while its active caseload climbed to 152,760. Mumbai recorded a 159-day high with 2,377 new cases, taking its tally to 349,974. The active case count in the city was 15,410.

The state reported 84 fatalities on Wednesday, pushing the toll to 53,080. Of the 84 deaths reported on Wednesday, 42 occurred in the past 48 hours and 28 in the past week. The remaining 14 deaths are from the period before last week. Mumbai reported eight fatalities, taking its death toll 11,551.

Nagpur city reported 2,698 fresh cases—topping the chart on Wednesday among the cities—followed by Pune city, which clocked 2,612 fresh cases. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region (excluding Mumbai) reported 2,434 fresh cases, including Kalyan-Dombivli with 637 fresh cases and Thane city with 516 new cases. Districts, including Nashik, Ahmednagar, Jalgaon, Aurangabad, Buldhana, Yavatamal, Nanded, Beed, and Nandurbar, reported the chunk of the fresh cases on Wednesday.

State health minister Rajesh Tope said though the cases are increasing, there is no need for “panic” as the state has adequate number of hospital beds and other life-saving equipment. He said that the bright side in the second surge is the death count and rate are under control. “I appeal to people of Maharashtra that there is no need to panic. There are enough beds in hospital, ICUs and oxygenated beds. In the second surge that we are witnessing today, the speed of infection is faster. If one person is infected, everybody in the house may get infected. Therefore, we need to follow Covid-appropriate behaviour,” Tope told reporters. He said that a chunk of the fresh cases are asymptomatic and are in home quarantine. “The ones who are admitted to the hospital, of them, only 5% of them are on oxygen, 3.8% are in the ICU,” he said.

He added the government has directed district and municipal authorities to increase its contact tracing and ramp up testing. Tope said the state’s average testing per million population stood at 138,000. “We have been testing over 100,000 [samples] for the past few days. Since the cases are going up, the Centre expects to further increase it and we will do so. We have nearly 500 RT-PCR laboratories in the state and we will ensure that all these laboratories carry out tests to its full capacity,” Tope said.

The minister said there is a challenge to trace contacts after the activities in the state have been fully unlocked. However, he said that the state is strictly following the three-T principle—trace, test, treat. “Today in the video conference with the prime minister the stress was on going back to tracing. We need to trace 20 to 30 contacts behind a positive patient. Definitely, there is a challenge in tracing today as we have opened up all activities, unlike earlier. The high-risk contacts who are family members mostly can be traced. But low-risk contacts difficult. However, we are going to follow it rigorously,” he assured.