Delhi: Lowest single-day case tally in 118 days

New Delhi: Delhi reported 1,091 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours — one of the lowest in nearly four months — out of the total 83,289 tests conducted, including 37,288 RT-PCR tests with a positivity rate of 1.3%.
The capital recorded 26 deaths on Sunday, the lowest in 67 days. It was also the sixth consecutive day when the positivity rate remained below 2%. While the positivity rate in Delhi has been below 5% since December 2, the death rate has been a cause of concern, but that figure too has been dipping compared to the high fatality rate witnessed during the peak of the third wave of Covid-19 last month.

The last time Delhi had witnessed a lower number of new Covid-19 cases was on August 24, when 1,061 cases were recorded out of just 11,910 tests, which were conducted on a Sunday.

The total number of Covid-19 positive cases reached the figure of 6,17,005 on Sunday and with 1,275 patients recovering from the disease in the last 24 hours, the total number of those who have recovered stands at 5,96,580 – a recovery rate of 96.6%.

The number of active cases as on Sunday was 10,148, out of which most patients – 5,907 – are recuperating in home isolation and 2,997 are admitted in hospitals, apart from 118 in Covid care centres and 35 in Covid health centres. Total 15,773 Covid beds are vacant in hospitals, 7,398 in Covid care centres and 527 in health centres. According to the Delhi Corona application, 815 out of total 1,522 Covid-19 ICU beds with ventilators are vacant while 2,842 ICU beds without ventilators out of total 3,578 are vacant.
The number of active cases on Sunday, in fact, was less than a fourth of the active cases a month ago on November 20 – 40,936, which translates to a daily dip of more than 1,000 cases on an average for the last 30 days. The reason the active cases have come down by 75.2% in the last 30 days is that while the number of people testing positive has been going down, the number of patients recovering from the disease has been going up.

The number of fresh cases have been dipping since November 20 and barring very few exceptions, every day the number of people recovering from Covid-19 has been higher than people testing positive, which explains the dip of 30,788 in the number of active cases in the last 30 days.

Apart from aggressive testing and increased contract tracing, another strategy of Delhi government that has helped in bringing the numbers down is creation of micro containment zones even at locations where less than three people have tested positive, if needed.

That explains why while the positivity rate has come down from 10.6% to 1.3% and new cases from 6,608 to 1,091, apart from the dip in active cases. However, the number of containment zones have gone up from 4,560 on November 20 to 5,943 on Sunday.