Coronavirus: Doubling time slows down, fatality rate low

NEW DELHI: As India completed 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 slowed down 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 stands at 3.2%, whereas the recovery rate — currently at 32.8% — has increased steadily over the 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 that there is no room for complacency, pointing to the 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 that 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 ago,” Oommen C Kurian, senior fellow at the health initiative of Observer Research Foundation, said.
Data analysis by economist Shamika Ravi, earlier part of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council, showed active cases were growing at 4.5% and doubling in 16 days — the slowest so far. It also showed that India recorded death rate of 1.79 per million people in the 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, the UK, the US, Sweden and Canada have a significantly high fatality rate that is growing.
The positivity rate has also come down in many states, even as testing has increased substantially with close to 95,000 samples being tested every day now. On Wednesday, health minister Harsh Vardhan said India had scaled up its testing capacity to 100,000 samples a day.
“We have ramped up testing significantly and though the number of positive cases are increasing, the positivity rate has remained stable at around 4%,” a senior official said.