NO COVID DEATH IN DELHI FOR 3RD STRAIGHT DAY, CAPITAL ADDS 50 FRESH INFECTIONS

NEW DELHI: The city added no Covid-19 deaths to its toll for the third straight day on Friday, showed state government data, the first time this has happened since May last year, before even the first wave of infections hit the national capital.

The state health department’s daily health bulletin on Friday added 50 infections to the city’s tally. The city has, over the past week, added an average of 52 cases every day. The Covid-19 case trajectory, which denotes a region’s infection curve, in the city has now been below 100 for 46 days.

At its peak in the third week of April, the seven-day average of new cases soared to a peak of 25,294 a day.

The 50 new cases came on the back of 73,324 new tests, at a positivity rate of 0.07%, and took the city’s overall Covid-19 tally to 1,436,988. So far, 25,068 people in Delhi have succumbed to the viral infection. Over 13,200 of them died between April and May alone, as Delhi battled a fourth wave of infections

Positivity rate is a crucial metric as it shows how widespread the virus is in the community, and when a dropping positivity rate is coupled with decreasing new cases, it indicates that the spread of the virus is reducing within the community. Tracking a region’s positivity rate serves as a good barometer for whether cases are going to increase or decrease in the coming days.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that the positivity rate from a region that has a comprehensive testing programme be at or below 5% for at least two weeks before it can be considered that the outbreak is under control. In Delhi, this number has been below the threshold for 85 days now, and below 1% for 75.

At the peak of the fourth wave of infections in Delhi during the third week of April, this statistic soared past 36%.

As on Friday, 468 people in Delhi are currently battling the infection.