Why the state was not able to check rapid Covid spread
MUMBAI: On April 7, exactly four weeks after the first Covid-19 case was detected in Maharashtra on March 9, the count reached 1018. That day, the death toll in the state was 64 (India’s overall toll was 160 that day), and the mortality rate stood at 6.29% (more than double of India’s mortality rate of 3.02 on the same day).
Thirty days later – on May 7 – the state had 17,974 cases and 694 deaths. In the next six days, India’s worst-hit state added nearly 8,000 cases to take the total to 25,922 and 975 deaths on Wednesday. Maharashtra has also recorded 5,547 recoveries. The states with the next highest number of cases and deaths are Tamil Nadu (9227 cases, 64 deaths) and Gujarat (8904 cases, 537 deaths).
Maharashtra’s mortality rate stands at at 3.76%, an improvement, but still above the national average of 3.23%. If it is excluded from the national data, India would have 49,912 cases and 1477 deaths on May 13, bringing the mortality rate down to 2.96%. The global mortality rate, according to data onworl do meters. info, is 6.72% (6 pm, May 13).
On Wednesday, Mumbai’s numbers stood at 15,747 cases and 596 deaths, giving a mortality rate of 3.78%. What went wrong in Maharashtra’s case? Why does one of India’s most industrialised and prosperous states have both the most number of Covid-19 cases as well as deaths? The answer perhaps lies in what the state did not do in January and February right up to March 9, when the first two Covid-19 cases were detected. In an interview with HT on April 8, Dr Avinash Bhondwe, president of Indian Medical Association, Maharashtra, laid the blame on travellers returning from the United Arab Emirates for the initial spurt. “More than 40% of the infections were owing to travellers who returned from the UAE,” he said.
“After the first case, the state government waited for 10 days to start screening travellers from the UAE. This was a major loophole in the screening process.”
Indian airports began universal screening in the third week of March. By then, on average, 42,000 international travellers landed in Mumbai every day. On March 22, India banned all domestic and international passenger flights to and from Indian airports. “By then, it was too late,” said a Maharashtra state health department official, who wished to remain anonymous. “Only a handful of the fliers were screened. We cannot know for certain the number of asymptomatic patients from the US, the UK, Singapore and south-east Asian countries that may have passed through airport between February and March 22.”
Dr Bharat Purandare, infectious diseases expert, Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital, Pune, said in an earlier interview to HT, “In retrospect, we can say that the government should have made universal screening mandatory much earlier. We should have stopped international flights in the first week of March.”
A month after the first case was detected, Maharashtra was testing at 290 per million population. Since then, it has improved its testing rate to 1892 per million on May 13. Gujarat tests at 1760 per million and Tamil Nadu is at 3523/million. Trouble with Mumbai, which accounts for a fifth of all cases in India, is that its detection rate over the last few days has risen to 33%. Which means, for every 100 persons tested, 33 are detected with Covid-19.
This was due to the change in testing protocol targeted at containment zones. Additional municipal commissioner, Suresh Kakani, told HT, “Often, pending test results were added to a particular day’s count. Hence it did not give us clarity. If we calculated the detection rate against 124,000 samples tested with 14,521 positive cases, then the detection rate remains 11.71%. This figure is higher than the state and national average because of targeted testing conducted by BMC in containment zones.”