City crosses 3,000 Covid cases; added 1,000 in just 5 days, has 50% of state’s active cases

Gurgaon: The city shot past the 3,000-mark on Saturday, adding 203 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours and the last 1,000 in just five days, indicating some more grim milestones lie ahead as it grapples to contain the spread of a pandemic swiftly gaining momentum here after a slow start.
The city also recorded six Covid-19 patients deaths on Saturday, taking its so far to 25 and Haryana’s to 78. The six deaths and two more in Faridabad accounted for all the Covid-19 fatalities reported by the state on Saturday.
In terms of cities with the biggest case load, Gurgaon is now the fifth highest in India, though its overall numbers are much smaller compared to the others. At 46.3% of the Haryana tally, Gurgaon’s share is higher in percentage terms than what Kolkata accounts for in West Bengal (32.7%) or Noida (6.8%) does in Uttar Pradesh.
But the case graphs in the four other cities that account for greater shares in their states — Chennai (71.3%), Ahmedabad (70.7%), Hyderabad (62.9%) and Mumbai (54.8%) — have been flatter, which means the numbers have been rising exponentially but consistently.
Gurgaon, on the other hand, went from accounting for 25% of Haryana’s cases on May 15 to 48.6% on June 1. While it had reported the state’s first Covid-19 case, on March 16, it had only 16% of the state’s case load in mid-April and 20% in mid-May.
In fact, 1,897 of its 3,125 cases came in just the last 10 days. So while its first 1,000 cases took 76 days, its next 1,000 took eight and the final five. That’s a growth rate of 12% over just the past week. Haryana’s is 10%, the highest in the country among states with more than 1,000 cases.
That has translated into 62% of Gurgaon’s cases being active as of Saturday. It also accounts for 50% of all active cases in the state. Haryana’s active case share is 60.5%. Nationally, it’s 47.1%. Gurgaon has been testing fast — 18,700 samples so far (a testing rate of 21,494 per million) — but its positivity rate has also been high, at 16.7% when Haryana’s is just 4%.
“The main reason the growth rate has been going up in Gurgaon is its proximity to Delhi. We are part of NCR. It’s a codependent ecosystem. When the lockdown was in place, Delhi’s case graph did not affect that of Gurgaon. Now that it is no longer in place, a rise in Delhi’s cases will lead to a rise in those of Gurgaon,” said district epidemiologist Dr Ram Prakash Rai.
The case surge in Gurgaon has occurred in three phases — the first week of April, the first week of May and, the biggest one, beginning last week of May. The first surge was a small one, around the time cases linked to the religious congregation of Tablighi Jamaat were being reported. The second followed the outbreak in Delhi’s Azadpur Mandi — the vegetable sellers of Khandsa Mandi would source their produce from the market in Delhi. The final, and much bigger, surge came when the lockdown was relaxed in Gurgaon and Haryana, from May 30.
Delhi’s biggest surge, when it started reporting more than 1,000 cases a day, started on May 28 — which coincides with that of Haryana. But while the scale of case growth in Delhi has been very high, the rate has been steady. Delhi’s growth rate over the past week has been 5%.
And 60.3% of its cases are active, roughly the same as Haryana’s. Which means the Delhi health infrastructure is out of bounds. Cases in Faridabad are also rising — it added 100 cases to cross the 1,000-mark and 710 of its 1,086 cases are active. “We have 3,399 beds ready in Gurgaon. And we have very few critical patients,” said Vivek Kalia, estate officer, HSVP, Gurgaon.
As of now, the strategy is two-pronged — ramp up health infrastructure and step up testing. “We are training more people in the health department to collect samples correctly. We have to ensure sample collection picks up,” said chief medical officer Virender Yadav.
As of Saturday, Gurgaon had 14 critical patients — seven on oxygen and seven on ventilators. The state has 48 critical patients — 33 on oxygen and 15 on ventilators. But these numbers are expected to go up. Projections for Gurgaon on Saturday put the number of cases in June at 35,000, of which 5,000 would need beds. If that happened, the city’s health infrastructure would get overrun.