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Maha cases cross 8k with 440 infections; toll at 342
Mumbai
Mumbai
The number of Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra crossed the 8,000 mark on Sunday with 440 new infections even as state government officials expressed confidence in existing containment measures and said they were preparing for the disease to peak by the second week of May.
The daily rise was roughly half that of Saturday’s record figure of 811. There are now 8,068 infected people in the state, which also recorded 19 deaths on Sunday, taking the total number of fatalities to 342.
Mumbai continued to record the majority of the state’s cases with 358 new infections on Sunday. The city now has 5,407 cases, while its surrounding areas of Thane, Palghar and Raigad districts have 936 cases in all. Mumbai reported 12 deaths, while Pune saw three, Jalgaon two and Solapur city and Latur saw one each on Sunday.
Top officials of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), which has 67.01% of the total Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra, said they are preparing for a spike by May 15. The civic body, according to Manisha Mhaiskar, one of the bureaucrats on the Covid-19 task-force in the BMC, is basing is preparedness plan on the projections of the central team, which recently visited the state.
“The current doubling rate of coronavirus in Mumbai is seven days. If seven days is taken as the input assumption, the modelling suggests that there would be around 70,000 cases towards second half of May. This has become the basis for preparing for the Ides of May,” Mhaiskar said.
According to her post, the “obvious” task before the civic body is to improve the doubling rate. House-to-house surveillance, aggressive contact tracing, and containment strategies have been put in place, an official added.
With cases rising in Mumbai and Pune, the state government is yet to take a call on the Centre’s notification allowing all neighbourhood shops to open. State government officials said that the administration is still considering the “pros and cons” of the move.
“Allowing shops to reopen in non-containment areas of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) and Pune region could be harmful as hundreds of cases are being recorded daily. The chief minister is taking a review of all areas,” a second official said.
Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday indicated that a decision on relaxation of restrictions in the state will be taken after a review of the situation once the national lockdown ends on May 3.
“There are questions about what will happen after the lockdown ends on May 3. Since April 20, we have gradually eased restrictions at some places. In Mumbai, this led to crowds that we cannot afford… We are not opening district borders in rural Maharashtra, but gradually easing restrictions within districts to allow economic activity to resume. I am receiving daily reports. I will hold a review today evening and decide on further relaxations from May 3 onwards,” Thackeray said, during his address via Facebook Live.
