Covid-19: At 12.5k, lowest 1-day cases in Delhi in a month; positivity rate dips to 17.8%

NEW DELHI: The capital recorded 12,481 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday — the lowest in a month — and a positivity rate of 17.76%, the lowest since April 14 (15.92%). Tuesday was the second day in a row the positivity rate was below 20% and the tenth day of it being consistently below 30% and dipping.
Tuesday saw 347 fatalities, taking the cumulative toll in the capital to 20,010, with the last 5,000 deaths being reported in just a fortnight.
Tuesday’s fresh cases were from 70,276 tests carried out in 24 hours, of which 54,619 were RT-PCR and 15,657 were rapid antigen tests. With 13,583 people recovering from the disease in the last 24 hours, the total number of active cases now stands at 83,809. Health minister Satyendar Jain said there was a dip in the number of tests because of the lockdown. “The positivity rate has come down from 36% to less than 20% and singleday cases from a high of 28,000 recently. The pace at which the cases were increasing is slowing down,” Jain said.
347 fresh Covid deaths take city’s overall toll past 20,000
However, we can’t take comfort in this till two criterion are met, which is that the positivity should be below 5% and there shouldn’t be more than 3,000 to 4,000 cases a day,” Jain said.
“The wave is very much there but it seems the peak has come down and the reversal trend started around the last week of April,” Jain said, adding the problem of finding oxygenated beds has gone down but the demand for beds is still very much there. “Though around 4,000 beds are available, around 20,000 hospital beds are occupied too and that much admission is a big number for any city or state,” Jain said. He said that compared to the third wave in November, 2020, when the highest single-day occupancy was around 9,500, the number had gone up to 22,000 recently.
That the present wave is the deadliest is reflected in the figures. Delhi recorded its first Covid-19 fatality on March 13, 2020. It took 191 days for the toll to breach the 5,000-mark on September 21, 2020 and another 84 to cross the
grim milestone of 10,000, on December 13 last year. From there, it took 135 days for the figure to reach the 15,000-mark, on April 27 this year. However, for the figure to reach from 15,000 to 20,000 took only 14 days, with every 500th fatality being added every day or two since April 18 to May 11.
The month of April saw 5,120 Covid-19 fatalities, the highest in a single month till date since 2,663 deaths in November, 2020 during the third wave. May, however, has already seen 3,863 people succumb to Covid-19 in just11 days.
While ICU beds are still scarce, the number of oxygenated hospital beds have gone up in the last one week. On May 2, there were a total 21,483 Covid-19 hospital beds, out of which 1,347 were vacant. On Tuesday, 3,890 out of total 22,953 hospital beds reserved for Covid-19 patients were vacant. Data shared by the state health department shows that 51,480 or 61.4% of the active cases are recuperating under home isolation.