Covid-19: India’s case fatality rate falls below 2% for the first time
Mumbai: On Monday, for the first time since the initial days of the pandemic in India, the case fatality rate (CFR) in the country fell below 2%, despite the number of infections going up.
The health ministry in its daily briefing said also India had registered more than 15 lakh recoveries as of Monday.
India has conducted 18,320 tests per million population, even as several states have exceeded the national average matching the World Health Organization’s guidance. The WHO guideline says 140 tests per million per day, health secretary Rajesh Bhushan said on Tuesday morning. Goa, Delhi and Tamil Nadu are testing the most.
The CFR on August 10 was 1.99%, down from 2.69% a month back and 2.90% on June 10. The infection fatality rate (IFR), which is calculated by taking the number of deaths in a week and the Covid cases reported four weeks prior, has also come down, an analysis by ET shows. The IFR was 3% in the week ended on Sunday against 4.6% in the week of July 13-19.
Bhushan said a combination of factors had helped India reduce the fatality rate. These included better clinical management as well as increased and early testing, he said.
However, the number of Covid cases in India is still going up, though on Monday India reported fewer new cases than the average for the previous week. Total active cases as on Tuesday night were 642,520, while the death toll was 46,185.
At a meeting with the chief ministers of 10 states that account for 81% of the total Covid-19 deaths in the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi advised them to increase containment, contact-tracing and surveillance efforts. The other areas of focus should include testing, tracing and isolating contacts of infected people within 72 hours. He also asked the states to bring down the mortality rate to below 1%.
