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Officials said the process of flattening of the curve has begun. Dr Subhash Salunkhe, public health expert, who is also heading the communicable diseases prevention control and technical committee of the state, said, “Plateauing [of cases] has started in Maharashtra according to my reading. But we will have to wait for another 12-14 days as more relaxations have been come into force only today [Wednesday]. We will have to see the number of new cases during this incubation period (14 days) and only then we can arrive at a conclusion.”

Last week, the state health minister Rajesh Tope, too, had said the peak has arrived and cases will hit a plateau by midaugust. “In my view, the peak has arrived and cases will continue to rise for another 15 days. We are expecting a plateau or flattening of the curve somewhere around August 15. Once we hit the plateau, cases will start declining,” Tope said.

The state government has allowed malls and market complexes to operate between 9am and 7pm from Wednesday. It has further allowed outdoor nonteam sports such as golf, gymnastics, tennis, badminton and malkhamb with conditions of social distancing and sanitation. Mumbai, meanwhile, has maintained stability in daily fresh cases with 1,125 cases reported on Wednesday. Its case count stands at 119,240. Of these, 20,679 are active cases.

On Tuesday, the city had recorded 709 cases, second-lowest spike since May 12, when it recorded just 426 cases. The city’s toll stands at 6,591, after 42 deaths were reported on Wednesday.

Pune continued to contribute maximum cases in the daily tally, as it recorded 1,282 cases on Wednesday, taking its total infections to 65,136. Pimpri Chinchwad, satellite city in the Pune Metropolitan Region, recorded 740 cases and is the third highest contributor in the state.

The state, meanwhile, continues to struggle with high fatalities.

As many as 1,482 deaths have been reported in the past five days as against 6,988 deaths in entire July, 5,638 in June, 2,286 in May, 449 in April and 10 in March. With 16,476 total deaths, the case fatality rate (CFR) of the state is 3.52% as on Wednesday. It continues to be second highest in the country after Gujarat, where CFR is 3.86% with 2,533 deaths (65,599 cases) till Tuesday, according to the statistics shared by the state medical education department. Maharashtra, however, still has highest number of deaths across states in the country.

The state’s positive rate stands at 19.40%, up from 18.57% on July 5. So far, the state has tested over 2,413,510 people, and of them, 1,945,245 have tested negative. Currently, 36,466 people have been kept at institutional quarantine facilities and 943,658 people have been home quarantined across the state.