MISMATCH BETWEEN OFFICIAL COVID TALLY, ACTUAL NUMBERS: HC PULLS UP GUJ

AHMEDABAD: The Gujarat high court, which initiated a suo motu petition on Monday into the state’s response to the Covid-19 situation, on Thursday pulled up the state government for the mismatch in the official infection numbers and the actual number of positive cases.

A division bench led by Chief Justice Vikram Nath said, “The figures given by the state are not matching with the actual number of positive cases.”

The court also sought to know the reason for the queues of ambulance vans outside hospitals and wanted to know why patients had to run from pillar to post for to get admitted into a health care facility.

When advocate general Kamal Trivedi, who represented the state government, claimed that there were adequate number of beds available in the hospitals, the justice Nath said, “You say only 53% of beds are occupied, so why there is so much noise about beds not being available in private and government hospitals?”

cases, the ministry said. Maharashtra alone accounts for 43.54% of the country’s total active cases.

The seven-day average of national positivity rate has now soared to 11.7% for the week ending Wednesday, the second highest it has ever been. This means that more than one positive case is emerging out of every 10 samples being tested for Covid-19 across the country.

The last time the national positivity rate was higher than this was for the week ending July 25.

The seven-day average of daily infections, which denotes the case curve of a region, has now surpassed the peak of the first wave in at least 12 states and Union territories across the country, a statistic that shows the geographical spread of the current outbreak.

These are Chandigarh, Chhattisgarh, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

All these regions have been setting new records for daily infections on a near-daily basis over the past few weeks.