City’s coronavirus count up to 47K, case doubling rate reaches 22 days

As the number of cases in the city inches towards the 50,000-mark, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) claims to have traced over 8.94 lakh high-risk and lowrisk contacts of over 45,854 positive cases. Meanwhile, the doubling rate in the city rose to 22 days on Saturday, according to the data from the civic body.

Of the 8.94 lakh contacts traced, around 2.19 lakh were high-risk and 6.74 lakh were low-risk.

High-risk contacts are those who are directly in touch with the Covid-positive patient, for example, a family member or friend. Low-risk contacts are those residing around, but not in direct contact with the infected person.

Daksha Shah, deputy executive health officer of BMC, said, “It is because of proactive contact tracing that we have been able to contain the virus spread. We have also collected 500 blood samples for a sero-surveillance test under which antibodies are detected. The results for the same are awaited.”

BMC officials have credited the aggressive contact tracing for keeping the case numbers lower than its projections. The civic body claims that it had predicted over 45,000 cases by the end of May but the 45,000 figure was crossed only on June 5.

Further, the overall growth rate of the infection in the city is now 3.28%, for which BMC has conducted over 2.20 lakh tests. The latest doubling rate of the city is 22 days, up from 10 days in the first week of May. However, since the first week of May, the case count has almost doubled. The doubling rate determines the time taken for the number of positive patients to double in a specific area.

On Saturday, the city reported a total of 1,274 cases and 58 new deaths, taking the total case count to 47,354 and the death toll to 1,577, according to state health department data.

The total number of active cases in the city as of Saturday stands at 25,794.