First 5 July days account for 80% of entire June West Bengal Covid count

KOLKATA: The cumulative number of infections recorded in Bengal in the first five days of July alone has crossed 80% of the total recorded throughout the entire month of June, even as the number of fresh Covid cases recorded on Tuesday - 1,973 - was short of the 2,000 mark by just a sliver, and close to half the day's cases being reported from the city alone.
There were 10,023 cases recorded in June; the first five days of July alone have seen 8,165 cases, or 81.5% of the June count.
The positivity rate of Bengal is 15.9%, a shade higher than that of Monday's 15%. Health officials, while saying there was no need to panic, urged caution, saying they expected the numbers to rise sharply soon.
The last time the daily case-rise was so close to the 2,000 mark was during the first week of February, when the third wave was on the wane. Cases started rising gradually from the second week of June, with fresh cases hitting the three-digit mark again on June 10.
Senior physician Sukumar Mukherjee, a member of the state government's Global Advisory Board on Covid-19, said it was expected that the number of fresh daily cases would touch 2,000, "if we take the baseline of the average fresh cases in the first week of June, which would be around 80. It is an increase of about 25-fold." He said even as most cases were expected to be asymptomatic and mild, there would still be a section who get severe disease. "And we still need to be careful about preventing the infection," he added.