Less than 1,700 new cases in city, positivity rate 2.4%

NEW DELHI: The national capital on Sunday added fewer than 2,000 new coronavirus disease cases for the first time since end-march, while the test positivity dropped below the 3% mark, as Delhi continued to make its way out of a brutal tsunami of infections that battered the city for a month.

With 1,649 infections recorded in the state government’s daily health bulletin on Sunday, daily cases were at their lowest since the city logged 992 cases on March 30, around the time Delhi’s fourth wave of Covid-19 began to expand its footprint.

Consequently, the seven-day average of cases, known as case trajectory, continued to fall in the city, with Delhi recording an average of 3,286 new infections each day over the past week, down to less than one-third from the previous week. In the week ending May 16, Delhi logged an average of 10,043 new cases a day. The week before that, the city saw an average of 18,374 cases every day.

Sunday’s case trajectory was also the lowest in the Capital since the week ending April 5, when Delhi added 2,906 new infections to its tally per day.

At its peak of the April-may surge, Delhi added 28,395 cases of the infection in a single day on April 20 — the most ever in the city since the pandemic broke out in March last year.

Promisingly, the Covid-19 test positivity rate — the proportion of tested samples that return positive for Covid-19 – fell to 2.4% on Sunday, the lowest since March 28, and down from 3.58% the previous day. Delhi’s positivity rate, regarded as a crucial metric to understand the spread of an infection, has now dropped for 17 days consecutively and has stayed below 5% for three straight days. Experts across the world, including the World Health Organization (WHO), consider an infection to be under control in a region if the test positivity rate stays below 5% for at least two weeks.

The number of deaths of the infection as per the health bulletin, however, went up slightly from the previous day. On Sunday, 189 people died of Covid-19, as against 182 people a day before. Covid-19 fatalities in Delhi have not dropped as precipitously as infections, though it must be noted that any drop in cases takes at least two weeks to have an impact on the number of consequent deaths.

Sunday’s death toll was lower than the number of fatalities a week ago, when Delhi saw 262 deaths of the infection. However, more people died of the infection on Sunday than during the peak of the Covid-19 surge on November 18, when 131 people died — the most in a single day at that time.

To be sure, the seven-day average of deaths has dropped for six days straight, from 300 on May 18 to 242 on Sunday.

Meanwhile, active cases continued to fall as new infections eased, giving health care systems, medical workers and funeral infrastructure a crucial breather. The fall in active cases, which dropped below the 30,000 mark on Sunday for the first time in 43 days, has allowed the state government to renew its focus on contact tracing, and revive the Capital’s home isolation system.

As on Sunday, 27,610 people in the Capital were battling Covid-19, less than half of the 62,783 active cases just a week ago.

Meanwhile, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday, while announcing a week-long extension of the lockdown, said curbs will be lifted in phases from May 31 if cases continue to decline.

Dr Jugal Kishore, head of the department of community medicine at Safdarjung hospital, said the state government’s preparedness to deal with Covid-19 cases after curbs are lifted is crucial.

“It is important to ask if our health systems are ready to take on a rise in cases after the curbs are lifted,” he said. “Do we have more hospital beds, more remdesivir, more antifungal medicines, and enough oxygen? This is what we need to ensure.”

He added that three steps are vital to stem the rise of further surges: Awareness of appropriate behaviour and available health infrastructure and treatments among citizens, contact tracing, and proper screening of passengers who arrive in the city from other states or countries.