Marginal dip in cases, experts say too early to call it plateauing
MUMBAI: Mumbai’s Covid numbers showed a marginal dip on Saturday, even though the overall case tally stayed above the 20,000-mark for the second consecutive day. In the last 24 hours, the city saw 20,318 fresh infections taking the overall case tally to 8,95,098 and five deaths, taking the toll to 16,399.
A total of 71,019 tests were conducted in Mumbai on Saturday. This was for the third consecutive day that nearly 70,000 tests have been conducted. The daily positivity rate stood at 28.6 per cent.
With the new cases hovering around 20,000, doctors are wondering whether the third wave is reaching a plateau, which means that the daily cases will remain constant for some time, before a gradual decline. However, experts said that they need to wait for one more week to reach conclusion.
“For every 65,000 to70,000 tests that are being done, about 15,000 to 20,000 fresh cases are being reported now. So, clearly, there is not much difference in the ratio between the tests conducted and positive cases. It’s possible that if more tests are done, then more cases could be reported,” Dr Rahul Pandit, a member of both National and Maharashtra Covid task force.
On Friday, municipal commissioner, Iqbal Singh Chahal had cited the example of Omicron spread in South Africa and said that the infection rate started to recede after the fifth week, and added that Mumbai is in the third week.
However, Pandit on Saturday said it will be unfair to compare the scenario of Mumbai with that of South Africa. “The vaccination rate and seropositivity rate in Mumbai is much higher than South Africa. We are in a much better situation. It’s safe to say that we are inching towards saturation point and graph is slowly moving towards a plateau,” he added.
Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of the state Covid task force, said that there are many people in the city who have taken self Covid tests, and these numbers are not getting added.