City sees positivity rate in single digit after 45 days

MUMBAI: After 45 days, the city’s daily positivity rate was down to a single digit – 9.01% – on Friday, according to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) data. While the BMC said 3,925 of the 43,525 tested samples were positive, the state data said the city saw 3,888 cases on Friday. Also, fatalities continue to rise, with the city reporting 89 deaths on Friday, according to BMC data. The city’s case tally is 648,471 and toll 13,125, according to the state health department.

Positivity rate is the number of positive Covid-19 cases in comparison to the total tests. On March 13, Mumbai’s daily positivity rate was 9.48%, which went up to 15% around March 20. In April, the positivity rate hovered around 11-27%, and it went down to 9.94% on Friday. The city’s highest ever positivity rate was 27.94%, reported on April 4. So far, Mumbai has conducted a total of 5,380,473 tests. The overall positivity rate is 11.9%.

BMC chief Iqbal Singh Chahal said, “Our positivity in singledigit now with around 4,400 tests. Of these, 85% cases are asymptomatic today. Mumbai is perhaps the only city in India with single digit positive even with high testing.”

The city’s recovery rate is 87% with 568,083 recoveries and the mortality rate is 2.02%. There are 65,670 active cases in the city. According to BMC’s data, Dahisar, Borivali, Kandivali, Malabar Hill, Grant Road, Churchgate and Colaba continue to contribute the most to the city’s daily average growth rate of 0.86%. The BMC has maintained that even though the cases are dipping, the lockdown announced by the state up to May 15 will remain in force in the city.

In the past few days, the daily number of Covid-19 cases in the city has been on a decline. The

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highest number of cases reported in the city so far was 11,206, on April 4. By mid-April, Mumbai was reporting on 7,000-8,000 cases a day. On April 15, Mumbai reported 8,209 Covid-19 cases, which dropped to 5,867 cases on April 24. These further dropped to 3,840 cases on April 26.

However, although the positivity rate has gone down, the number of deaths in the city is on the rise. A week-on-week death rise analysis of the state health department data reveals that between April 4 and April 10, 190 deaths were reported, 357 deaths in the next week between April 11 and April 17, followed by 425 deaths between April 18 and April 24.

On the increasing deaths, Chahal had on April 20 said, “Mumbai had 953 deaths in the past 70 days since the second wave started with 2.66 lakh positive cases. Our death rate has been 0.03% (13.6 deaths per day). Delhi had 240 deaths in 1 day yesterday.”

Dr Madhav Sathe, former microbiology professor at Nair Hospital, said, “Cases in Mumbai are going down slowly which shows that lockdown restrictions have helped in lowering Covid cases. Not only positive cases, but aggressive vaccination will also reduce fresh cases, which will result in reducing the deaths. Heavy load of active serious cases has put enormous pressure on the healthcare system, which has also resulted in increased mortality. Health infrastructure is unable to handle this sudden rise in active cases which has resulted in difficulty in getting life-saving drugs, oxygen, ICU beds for needy patients, even test reports are made available after three to four days after sample collection that is causing delay in treatment.”