FOURFOLD RISE IN DAILY CASES ACROSS INDIA

NEW DELHI: The number of Covid-19 cases reported in a day has seen a nearly four-fold rise over the past one month, with 990 cases reporting positive on April 15 as opposed to 3,525 cases reported on May 13, according to data collated by the Association of Healthcare Providers of India (AHPI), and released on Wednesday. Hindustan Times’s own dashboard, showed 12,330 new cases on April 15 and 78,015 on May 13.

However, the case positivity rate has been hovering between 3-4%, with upper limit so far being 6.21%, and the case recovery rate has also seen a steady rise in India and currently stands at 32.8%, the body said.

Union health minister Harsh Vardhan said on Wednesday that while the doubling time for the number of infections reduced to 11 days over the past two weeks, it has improved to 12.6 days over the past three days, an indication that the spread may be slowing.

There are nine states and UTs that have not reported any cases of Covid-19 in last 24 hours: Andaman Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Goa, Chhattisgarh, Ladakh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram. Daman and Diu, Sikkim, Nagaland and Lakshadweep have not reported any case to date.

The sample testing capacity has also been strengthened, and on Tuesday India tested 94,708 samples for Covid-19 in a single day, health ministry said.

Currently, India can test one lakh samples a day, and a total of 18,56,477 tests have been done so far since the country first started testing samples for Covid-19 on January 24. That translates into around 1430 tests per million of population.

“India has done well in managing the disease so far, and in future also if required we have requisite infrastructure in place to deal with the rush of patients,” said Harsh Vardhan.

As on Wednesday, India has about 900 dedicated Covid hospital operational with 1,79,882 beds (Isolation beds- 1,60,610 and ICU beds- 19,272), and 2,040 dedicated Covid health centres with 1,29,689 beds (Isolation beds- 1,19,340 and ICU beds- 10,349), along with 8,708 quarantine centres, according to the health ministry data.

The Centre has also provided 7.8 million N95 masks and 4.2 million personal protective equipment (PPE) kits to the States and union territories, and central government hospitals