Covid-19: Doubling time improves to 12.6 days, recovery rate stands at 32.8%

NEW DELHI: As India completes 50 days of a national lockdown, statistical indicators of COVID-19 show an improved picture with doubling time of cases increasing after a slight dip, a growing recovery rate, low fatality rate and a largely stable positivity rate.
Amid new cases being reported every day, the doubling time of confirmed COVID-19 cases improved to 12.6 days from around 10 days it had fallen to last week. The doubling rate was three days before the lockdown. The fatality rate from the viral infection is 3.2%, whereas the recovery rate – currently at 32.8% - has increased steadily over past few weeks, according to health ministry data.
Analysts and public health experts say the statistics are indicative of efficient containment measures and clinical management of positive cases so far. However, they maintain, there is no room for complacency pointing to need to control high incidence cities like Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi.
“We know that perhaps barring some states with relatively lower testing, the fatality rate is not too high. Given our positivity rate is very low, I don’t think there is widespread virus transmission yet. Overall, we are doing much better than what was anticipated a month back,” says Oommen C Kurian, senior fellow at the health initiative at ORF.
Data analysis by economist Shamika Ravi, earlier part of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, shows active cases are growing at 4.5% and doubling in 16 days – slowest so far. It also shows India recorded death rate of 1.79 per million people in last 10 days (between May 2 and 12), whereas South Korea, which has done well in managing COVID-19, has a rate of 5.02 and Japan 5.17. Countries like Belgium, UK, US, Sweden and Canada have a significantly high fatality rate that is growing.
The positivity rate has also come down in many states in India, even as testing has increased substantially with close to 95,000 samples every day now. On Wednesday, health minister Harsh Vardhan said India has scaled up its Covid-19 testing capacity to 100,000 samples a day.
“We have ramped up testing significantly now and though the absolute number of positive are increasing, the positivity rate have remained stable at around 4%,” a senior official said, underlining that COVID-19 cases have increased only proportionately.
Kurian says it is difficult to miss deaths, whereas expanded testing will bring forth more cases.
Ravi’s analysis shows states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Jammu & Kashmir, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh are ahead of the infection with a low positivity rate.
However, states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Delhi continue to add significant number of cases on a daily basis. Besides, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and now Bihar are also reporting large number of new cases and are struggling to reduce the prevalence. These states require to ramp up contact tracing and testing, says Ravi.