The surge in new COVID-19 cases across Pune continued relentlessly with the district recording 217 fresh ones over a 12-hour span on Thursday as the case tally rose to 23,897.
Pune district’s death toll reached 788 with 25 fatalities being reported on Wednesday.
The sharp overnight spike comes after the district recorded its highest single-day surge of a whopping 1,251 cases on Wednesday.
Of the total case tally, the number of active positive cases stands at 8,615 with as many as 14,494 recoveries thus far.
As per figures given by the Pune Zilla Parishad’s Health Department till Wednesday night, there were 8,398 (excluding the overnight surge) active cases in various hospitals across the district of whom 6,380 are undergoing treatment in hospitals in Pune city, 1,430 in Pimpri-Chinchwad and 588 in Pune’s rural areas.
414 in critical condition
As many as 414 of the active cases in the district are in a critical condition.
The number of fresh cases has seen a dramatic rise after June 20, following which the district has been witnessing average daily case surges of more than 700.
Of the 1,251 cases reported on Wednesday, 860 were from Pune city and 282 from Pimpri-Chinchwad.
With 40% of the cases in Pune city emerging from outside ‘containment zones’, Pune civic body authorities have decided to take a weekly stock of the situation to re-designate fresh containment areas.
Pune at present has 105 or so micro-containment clusters.
Likewise, at least 30% of the cases in the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) area were emerging outside the containment zones.
“While 65-70% of the cases being reported in the PCMC are still being detected in the containment zones, the remaining ones are emerging outside of these. There are 12 slum-clusters which are contributing to the majority of the cases,” PCMC Commissioner Shravan Hardikar told The Hindu.
Despite a recovery rate of 60%, the drastic rise in new cases in the last few days has brought down the city’s case doubling rate, which now stands at 17.98 days — a significant decrease from last week’s figure of 20.77 days.
Pune district health officer Bhagwan Pawar said that till Wednesday, the samples of a total 1,45,398 persons had been tested in Pune district of which more than 1.17 lakh had returned negative. A total 11,631 persons were at present kept in quarantine facilities in the district.