Maharashtra sees 8,522 Covid-19 cases, tally up to 1,543,837

Keeping with the trend of declining Covid-19 cases over the past few weeks, the state on Tuesday reported 8,522 new infections, below 10,000 for a second day in

Keeping with the trend of declining Covid-19 cases over the past few weeks, the state on Tuesday reported 8,522 new infections, below 10,000 for a second day in a row, taking the tally to 1,543,837. The daily count of fatalities, too, decreased to below 200 for a second straight day to 187, taking the toll to 40,701. Mumbai’s number of new infections, too, remained low at 1,325, which is the level it had maintained from June to August, before the September surge. The tally is 232,391 cases.

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Of the 187 fatalities reported on Tuesday, 38 were from Mumbai, taking the city’s toll to 9,507, 19 from Pune (13 in the city and three each in rural parts and Pimpri-Chinchwad), 19 in Nagpur district and 10 in Navi Mumbai. The case fatality rate (CFR) in the state, however, remained constant at 2.64%

The fall in new infections was witnessed across the state. Pune district clocked 1,304 cases (490 in city, 587 in rural parts and 227 in Pimpri-Chinchwad), while Nashik and Nagpur logged 774 and 657 cases. Solapur, Satara and Sangli, the western Maharashtra districts which had been reporting high number of cases for a few weeks, saw 258, 266 and 259 infections respectively.

The state, however, has been conducting fewer tests in the past two weeks compared to last month. The daily tests average in 13 days of October fell to 75,138, from the daily average of 88,209 tests in September. In the first two weeks of September (1-15) the state saw 12,70,131 tests at a daily average of 84,675 tests, which went up to daily average of 91,743 tests in the next fortnight between September 16 and 30. The fall in the number of tests comes, surprisingly, when chief minister Uddhav Thackeray has announced to increase the daily testing to 1.5 lakh.

During his video conference with prime minister Narendra Modi last month, Thackeray said the state was planning to increase testing by double to take it to 1.5 lakh mark.

State health minister Rajesh Tope, on Saturday, directed the district authorities to increase the testing aggressively to contain the transmission.

The positivity rate in the state has, however, declined to 16.31% in October after hovering around 20% over the past two months. In the first two weeks of September, the positivity rate was 24.04% which fell to 20.82% in the second fortnight between September 16 and 30. The daily caseload of Covid-19 cases has witnessed a significant fall over the past three weeks.

Dr Ravi Wankhedkar, former national president of Indian Medical Association said, “Fall in the positivity rate even after reduction in the tests, is a good sign. But in any case the tests should not be reduced as it may lead to more fatalities when our CFR is already high in the country. More importantly, when we have been lingering under the possible threat of a second wave of the infection, which has been witnessed in many countries across the globe, the authorities should not let their guard down. As a result of restaurants being allowed to open from October 5 and Navratri festival beginning on October 17, we can expect surge in cases 14 days later.”

According to officials from the health department, although the positivity rate is falling steadily and would help them to achieve the target of below 10%, the high CFR is a matter of concern for the authorities. An official said that when the other states have been able to bring CFR down in the recent past, it’s hovering at 2.65% for past few weeks. “The high rate of mortality is because of the poor ratio of contact tracing per infection,” he said.

64,099 tests were conducted in the state in the last 24 hours at the positivity rate of 13.30%. The recovery rate touched 84.03% after 15,356 infected people were reported to have recovered in 24 hours, taking the tally of recovered patients to 12,97,252. The number of active patients in the state stands at 205,415. Pune has the highest, 40,733, number of active patients, followed by Thane (31,527) and Mumbai (24,019).