Gurgaon: The city has seen a significant drop in its Covid-19 positivity rate within a month — from 8% on December 1 to 2% on January 1.
Gurgaon’s positivity rate had climbed to a high of 16% on November 14, after which it started to decline. By the end of November, it had dropped to 10%, and by mid-December 15, to 5%. On December 29, it further decreased to 4% and to 2.5% on December 31.
“We are conducting pool testing, which saves time and resources. It also increases the testing capacities of labs, cuts costs and requires less manpower. The drop in the positivity rate allowed us to reduce hospital beds for Covid patients, which has helped non-Covid patients,” said Gurgaon chief medical officer Viender Yadav.
In the past four weeks, there has also been a decline in the average daily new cases. The weekly average daily cases fell from 416 in the first week of December to 328 in the second, 155 in the third and 92 in the fourth week.
Meanwhile on Friday, for the eighth day in a row, the city reported less than 100 cases. With 64 more people testing positive, the Covid tally now stands at 56,855. The health department said 113 patients also recovered on the day, bringing the total number of recoveries to 56,622. No deaths were reported. So far, 343 people in the city have died of Covid, of whom 266 had comorbidities.
The city has a total of 890 active cases, and 806 of the patients are in home isolation. The recovery rate stands at 97.7%.
On Friday, four people were sent to institutional quarantine facilities. So far, 6,70,888 people have been put under surveillance in Gurgaon. In the past 24 hours, the health authorities collected 3,136 samples for antigen and RT-PCR tests.
So far, 6,67,302 samples have been sent for testing, of which 6,07,302 were negative while results of 2,059 are awaited.