Covid-19: Delhi crosses 1 lakh cases but there is silver lining

NEW DELHI: On Monday, Delhi got a dubious distinction on the Covid-19 front: it is the first city in the country to have crossed the 1 lakh-mark of positive cases. The national capital now has 1,00,823 corona cases. With 48 fresh deaths, the toll has mounted to 3,115.

The situation is not entirely grim, though. The Health Department bulletin said 1,379 fresh cases were reported on Monday, a record drop after 19 days. This is for the first time in several weeks that less than 2,000 cases have been reported in a day. The last time the city recorded less than 2,000 cases was on June 15, when 1,859 persons had tested positive. Also, the recovery rate has improved.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said a drop in the number of daily cases and a declining positivity rate indicated an improvement in the situation. “In the last three months, the number of corona patients in Delhi has reached approximately 1 lakh. But there is no need to worry or panic as out of the one lakh people, 72,000 have recovered. The recovery rate in Delhi has gone up to 72 per cent, which is a huge figure,” he said.

Claiming considerable improvement in the corona situation, the CM said, “Last month, around 35 out of 100 people were found to be positive when tests were carried out. Now, only 11 out of 100 people are found positive.”

Delhi has also ramped up Covid-19 testing as well as infrastructure lately, with help from the Centre. Kejriwal said there are 15,000 beds for Covid-19 patients, of which only 5,100 are occupied. “That means there are only 5,100 patients in all the hospitals in Delhi,” he pointed out. Last week, this figure was 6,200.
“The number of patients admitted to the hospitals has gone down and patients are recovering and returning to their homes. People can check the availability of beds in the hospitals on the DelhiCorona App,” he said.

The Union Health Ministry has said the average number of samples being tested per day in Delhi has gone up from 5,481 to 18,766 in about a month. In spite of increased testing, the positivity rate has declined from around 30 per cent to 10 per cent in the last three weeks.

“I request recovered coronavirus patients to come forward and donate their plasma in large numbers,” Kejriwal said.He said authorised helpline numbers of COVID hospitals are being shown in the ‘Delhi Corona’ mobile app. This happened after the government received complaints that the helpline numbers of these medical facilities remained unreachable.

Top three cities
After Delhi, Mumbai has the highest number of corona cases. The total number of cases in Mumbai is 85,724 while the death toll is 4,938. Chennai, a distant third, has 70,017 cases and 1,082 deaths.