6,603 new cases take Maha Covid-19 count to 223,724

Maharashtra’s Covid-19 case count reached 223,724 on Wednesday after 6,603 new infections were reported, even as hotels and lodges reopened their shutters. The number

Maharashtra’s Covid-19 case count reached 223,724 on Wednesday after 6,603 new infections were reported, even as hotels and lodges reopened their shutters. The number of new cases rose after recording relatively fewer fresh cases for three consecutive days till Tuesday. The state has 91,065 active cases, according to the health department. The number of recovered patients also increased to 123,192 after 4,634 patients recovered and were discharged from various hospitals across the state. The recovery rate of the state has improved to 55.06%.

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Wednesday’s single-day jump was the second highest after Saturday, which saw 7,074 cases. Maharashtra crossed the grim 2-lakh case mark in 17 weeks since the first case was reported on March 9.

The state on Wednesday recorded 198 more deaths, pushing the toll to 9,448, health officials said. The highest one-day toll of 295, too, was reported on Saturday.

Mumbai’s case tally reached 87,856 after 1,347 cases were reported in the past 24 hours. The city has 23,543 active cases. On Tuesday, the city had recorded 785 cases, lowest single-day spike in the last 57 days. Mumbai’s toll stands at 5,064 after 62 deaths were reported. On June 27, Mumbai reported its highest single-day spike of 2,077 cases.

Health experts said that the decline in new cases will have a significance only if it sustains for 10-14 days. After the single-day spike in cases crossed the 7,000 mark, the state reported a relatively lower increase in new cases — 6,555, 5,368 and 5,134 — on July 5, July 6 and July 7, as against 7,074 cases on July 4.

“Though it is a good sign, the three-day period actually has no significance. In case of such a pandemic, we will have to monitor the trend for over a period of seven to ten days and if it continues to reduce for 14 days, then we will be in a position to say that it is a very good sign,” said Dr Subhash Salunkhe, public health expert, who is also heading the communicable diseases prevention control and technical committee of the state.

In the past eight days (since July 1), the state recorded 48,965 cases, as against 302 cases in March, 10,196 cases in April, 57,157 cases in May and 102,172 cases registered in June. It means, on an average, the state is getting as many as 6,120 cases per day.

Before that, a sharp surge in cases was observed in the previous 12 days — as on June 24, the state had 3,890 cases, which rose to 4,841 the very next day. It then recorded over 5,000 cases for five days and over 6,000 cases for two days and crossed 7,000 on July 4.

The state is also wary of the surge in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). In the region, the cases have increased to 138,695 cases (on July 8) from 55,086 cases on June 3, when the state decided to provide relaxations in red zones, which includes MMR.

Along with spike in cases, the state is also facing a large number of deaths on a daily basis. In the past eight days (since July 5), it has recorded 1,442 Covid-19 casualties.

The state has recently decided to form task-force of expert doctors in all districts to control the situation.

With 9,448 deaths, the case fatality rate (CFR) of the state was recorded as 4.22%. It is second highest in the country after Gujarat where CFR is 5.26% with 1,977 deaths (37,550 cases) till Tuesday, according to statistics shared by the state medical education department.

Maharashtra still has highest number of deaths across states in the country.

State health minister Rajesh Tope said that they are focusing on reducing CFR and for this they have decided to increase daily number of tests in the state. “We have decided to conduct more testing so that more people can be traced and CFR as well as positive rate against total testing can be reduced and be brought under 10%,” Tope said.

Currently, the positive rate against total tests is 18.77% as 223,724 tests were found positive out of total 11,91,549 samples tested so far.

He said that the state is doing more tests than the target of 140 per day against per million population in each district set by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Currently, 47,072 people have been kept in institutional quarantine and 6,38,762 people have been put under home quarantine across the state. The health minister said the existing institutional quarantine facilities in Metro cities need to be augmented, considering aggressive contact-tracing in slum areas.