In term of fatalities, the month of August was the worst with the death of 1,856 Covid patients, which is nearly 53% of the total deaths — 3,486 till Monday with 63 deaths in the past 24 hours.

August has been the worst month in terms of Covid-19 pandemic for Uttar Pradesh as 63% of the total positive cases were reported last month. As the state’s Covid count rose to 2,30,414 on Monday with the addition of 5,061 new cases, as many as 1.45 lakh were added in the last 31 days – a 170% increase in the caseload from July with an average growth rate of 5.5%.

However, the month had a brief lull in the infection and a rapid increase in the recovery rate at one point in the third week of August had brought down the number of active cases to nearly 49,300 after hitting a high of 51,537 in mid-August. Nonetheless, the surge in cases, particularly in the past two weeks took the active cases to an all-time high of 54,788 on Monday despite a healthy recovery rate of nearly 75%.

This could be attributed, as mentioned above, to the surge in infection from districts like Lucknow, Kanpur Nagar, Varanasi, Prayagraj, Gorakhpur, Bareilly among others even as cases in west UP districts that were once the biggest hotspots like Agra, Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddh Nagar started showing signs of slowing down. Notably, given the unpredictable nature of the pandemic, the two NCR districts – Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddh Nagar — along with a few west UP districts such as Meerut, Aligarh and Moradabad have started showing a spike in infection in the last few days.

In term of fatalities, the month of August was the worst with the death of 1,856 Covid patients, which is nearly 53% of the total deaths — 3,486 till Monday with 63 deaths in the past 24 hours. While on an average 60 people died every day in August, the case-fatality rate, however, has dropped to 1.51% from 1.91% in July end. This could be attributed more to the high rate of infection instead of any slowing down in the death rate.

Another gloomy figure is the test-positivity rate, which has also been flagged by the Health Department officials.

In his daily press briefing on Sunday, Additional Chief Secretary (Medical & Health) Amit Mohan Prasad said that while the overall test-positivity rate of the state for August was 4.7% – the highest so far – districts like Kanpur Nagar, Lucknow, Gorakhpur, Maharajganj, Deoria and Kushinagar were reporting as high as 10% test-positivity rate.

According to him, districts like Baghpat, Mahoba, Hathras, Sambhal and Hamirpur were reporting lowest test-positivity rate in the state.

The prevalence of high test-positivity rate in some of the highly infected districts is a point of concern as the state has ramped up testing to nearly 1.5 lakh tests a day. By Sunday, Uttar Pradesh had tested 56.26 lakh samples – the highest in the country. So far, 25,011 people have been tested for every 10 lakh in the state.