Covid infections spike again, hospitalisation rate still low
HT Correspondent
NEW DELHI: With 3,718 new cases of Covid-19 reported across India on Thursday, according to HT’S dashboard, a brief uptick fuelled by pockets of outbreak in the country’s large urban centres continued to expand slowly.
Two states – Kerala and Maharashtra – were the largest contributors to the national tally, accounting for over 62% of all new cases.
With 1,278 new cases on Thursday, Kerala contributed the most cases to the national tally in the day. Maharashtra, India’s worsthit state, saw 1,045 new infections with Mumbai alone accounting for 704 of the cases, data furnished by the states showed.
Experts have repeatedly stressed said that with the advent of widespread vaccination in the country, while new surges may crop up in some pockets from time-to-time, as long as hospitalisations and fatalities from the disease remain low, there is no immediate cause for concern as the new variants of the virus are largely asymptomatic or mild, with only small fraction resulting in deaths across the world.
The biggest contributor to the national tally appears to be a handful of large metropolitan cities such as Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi.
The seven-day average of daily infections in Mumbai has now climbed to more than 400 cases a day for the past week. Just two weeks ago, this number was 143 – marking an increase of nearly 200%. Delhi, meanwhile, saw a brief uptick in cases through May, but is currently seeing infections statistics decline in recent weeks.
As things stand on Wednesday, only 0.42% of Mumbai’s 24,473 hospital beds earmarked for Covid patients are occupied. Not a single Covid patient is currently hospitalised in Chennai and Bengaluru, according to data from their respective administrations.