Lucknow deadliest day with 65 fatalities, toll crosses 2,000

LUCKNOW: Thursday turned out to be the city’s deadliest day in 14 months of Covid-19 pandemic with 65 patients succumbing to the virus in 24 hours, taking the number of deaths since the outbreak to over 2,000.
Though the number of new infections registered a sharp drop from 3,004 to 1,865 on Thursday, the lowest in past four weeks, it was overshadowed by the fact that three patients died every hour in city’s covid hospitals.
Till now, the highest number of 42 deaths was recorded on April 24. The second wave that started on March 15 has infected 1.4 lakh people in just 51 days and left 825 patients dead. Recoveries during this period were around 1.1 lakh, including 3,755 on Thursday.
The intensity of the second wave, said to be 20 times more than the first, ravaging the city could be measured from the average of 16 daily fatalities, 2,627 infections and 2,059 recoveries. A comparison showed that while the first 500 Covid-19 deaths during the pandemic occurred in 149 days, the next 500 took place in 79 days and another 500 in 137 days, but the last 500 took just 17 days. Health officials said though the number of people with active infection has dropped to 29,827 from over 52,000 on April 12 because recoveries have been higher than new cases for the last 14 days, hospitals are still overwhelmed because most of the patients who recovered were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms in home quarantine.
More than 6,500 patients are in various Covid hospitals, of which condition of over 3,000 is serious. “This means that casualties will not come down in the coming days, although new infections may drop,” a senior health officer said.