After two months, Delhi corona cases below 1,000, deaths 122

DELHI recorded 956 Covid-19 cases on Saturday over the past 24 hours, the first time the numbers fell below four digits in 67 days. A total of 80,473 tests were done, which means the positivity rate in the Capital is further down to 1.19%. However, the number of deaths still remains high, with 122 recorded on Saturday.

At the peak of the second surge, the city had a positivity rate of 36.24%.

The last time the city recorded less than a thousand cases was on March 22, when there were 888 cases, a positivity rate of 1.32% and seven deaths.

According to doctors, the deaths remain high despite a drop in cases as these were serious patients who fell ill at the height of the surge and have been in ICU for a long time.

Between March 22 and Saturday, Delhi recorded 7,75,774 cases of Covid — or around 54% of the 14.2 lakh cases recorded in the city since the start of the pandemic. In the same period, the city lost 13,137 people to the disease, again more than half the total 24,073 Covid deaths.

The highest numbers were recorded on April 22 when the city saw 26,169 cases and 306 deaths. On that day, as per the Delhi government’s Covid dashboard, there were only 15 ICU beds amidst the 2,137 vacant across the city.

With the steady decline in the daily case graph, the pressure on the medical infrastructure has decreased considerably. As of Saturday evening, the city had 22,947 vacant hospital beds, 19,150 vacant oxygen beds, 3,862 vacant ICU beds and 953 vacant ICU beds with ventilators for Covid patients.

According to Dr Puneet Misra, Professor of Community Medicine at AIIMS, the sharp downward graph in positive cases was expected. “If I speak only for Delhi, during the first wave, less number of people were infected and when people were infected, only around 30% of a household were infected together. This time we saw that 90-100% of a family were getting infected together. The infectivity was more and a huge population were getting infected in very less time. Because so many were infected quickly in little time, now lots of people have natural immunity after recovery, and also a lot of people have immunity due to vaccines.”

Misra added, “There are very less chances for infection to go beyond a certain limit because the susceptible population is not much now in Delhi, until movement starts. Like any other epidemiologist we were quite sure even in the last week of April, when there were a huge number of cases, that by May 15 or so they would start declining and the situation would be much better.”

However, the number of mucormycosis cases in the city continues to be a matter of concern, with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal putting the number at 450 on Friday evening. Antifungal drug Amphotericin B remains in short supply.