Covid-19’s deadliest week in India: 26L cases, 23.8k deaths

In the deadliest week yet of the Covid-19 pandemic, India recorded more than 26 lakh new cases and nearly 23,800 deaths in the past seven days, though daily infection numbers registered a drop after hitting a peak of over 4 lakh on Friday.

India reported 3,70,188 fresh cases on Sunday, the second consecutive day of falling numbers following a tally of 3.92 lakh on Saturday. There was a slight drop in the death toll from the virus as well, with 3,375 fatalities reported on Sunday, a day after casualties had climbed to an all-time high of close to 3,700.

Overall, however, the daily numbers remain very high. The April 26-May 2 week ended with India posting the highest number of new cases recorded in any country over a seven-day period for the second week running. Last week, the country had logged nearly 22.5 lakh cases. During its worst week of the pandemic (January 4-10), the US had reported 17.7 lakh new cases, as per worldometers.info. While weekly numbers were still on the rise, there was a discernible slowdown in the growth. The current week's numbers were 16% higher than the April 19-25 case tally, down from a growth rate of 47% in that week. Deaths rose at a high rate of 47% although lower than the previous week's growth of 89%.

Worryingly, the positivity rate during the current week was 21.4%, higher than the rate of 19.8% in the previous week. This could be an indication that the current surge was not over yet. Positivity rate is the percentage of people reporting positive for the virus out of the total number tested. On Sunday, fresh cases dipped in several key states. Maharashtra reported 56,647 new cases, the first drop below the 60,000 mark in the state in six days. At 669, fatalities too dropped below 700 after being more than 800 in the past two days. Fresh cases in Karnataka dipped below 40,000 after two days to 37,733. The state had recorded a high of 48,296 on Friday.

On the other hand, six states and UTs reported their highest daily cases, led by Andhra Pradesh, where 23,920 fresh infections were reported.