India coronavirus numbers explained: The peak in Delhi’s latest wave of coronavirus infections is getting higher by the day. With 7,745 new cases detected on Sunday, Delhi scaled a fresh record, and now is also the fastest-growing state in the country, having overtaken Kerala.
In fact, in the last one week, Delhi has contributed more cases than any state, including Maharashtra and Kerala. More than 46,000 new cases were found in the national capital in the last week, a couple of hundred cases more than Kerala. Maharashtra has detected only about 36,000 cases this past week.
With a growth rate of 1.6 per cent a day, Delhi is currently growing more than three times faster than the national rate. It is one of the very few states that are currently witnessing an increase in their active cases. Delhi has close to 42,000 active cases right now, which is lower than only Maharashtra and Kerala.
What is more worrying, however, is the fact that the death count in the national capital has also been rising sharply. In the last few days, Delhi has reported more deaths than any state except Maharashtra. On Sunday, 77 deaths were reported, while 79 deaths were recorded the previous day. The city has recorded close to 7,000 deaths till now. Five states – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal – have recorded more deaths.
Another state which has been recording very high number of deaths relative to its size is Chhattisgarh. In the last couple of weeks, the state has been reporting between 40 and 60 deaths every day, though this number has been comparatively low in this past weekend, with 22 deaths getting reported on Saturday and 13 on Sunday. Close to 2,500 people have so far died in Chhattisgarh, which also saw its confirmed caseload cross the two lakh figure on Sunday. The state had been growing very fast last month, reporting over 3,000 cases on several days. The daily detection of cases has now come down to between 1,500 and 1,700.
Odisha has also crossed a milestone, with its total caseload now exceeding three lakh. A few days earlier, West Bengal had crossed the four-lakh mark. While Odisha has slowed down considerably in the last few weeks, West Bengal continues to grow at a fast pace. In fact, among the major state, it is one of only three with a current growth rate higher than one per cent a day, the others being Delhi and Kerala.
The biggest improvement has happened in Maharashtra, where the number of fresh cases has remained below 6,000 for almost ten days now. Two days ago, the state had reported around 6,800 new cases, but that was only because over 1,800 unreported cases from Nagpur from the months of June to September had been added to the tally. In the last two weeks, the daily number has crossed 6,000 only twice. At one point of time, in September, Maharashtra had begun to report more than 22,000 cases a day.
The consistent decline in cases for more than a month has meant that Maharashtra now has less than one lakh active cases for the first time since the second week of July. At its peak in the middle of September, Maharashtra had more than three lakh active cases, almost one-third of the entire country. Now it has less than one-fifth. The number of active cases fell below one lakh on Saturday, and came further down o Sunday. The state now has a little over 96,000 active cases.
About 46,000 new cases were detected across the country on Sunday, taking the total number of confirmed cases so far to 85.53 lakh. Out of these, more than 79,17 lakh, or nearly 93 per cent, have recovered from the disease. The number of active cases is about 5.09 lakh
