No Monday dip: India records 36,000 Covid cases, a 115-day high

NEW DELHI: Despite a substantial dip in testing on Sunday, daily Covid-19 cases in India continued to rise, with Monday’s tally likely to cross 36,000 to a 115-day high. By late Monday night, the day’s case count stood at 35,565, with data from three states not yet available. Based on the trends of the last few days, the final tally is likely to be at least 36,500. The previous time the country had recorded a higher single-day case count was on September 10 last year, when over 37,868 cases were reported, as per TOI’s Covid database.

Daily cases invariably dip on Mondays due to lower testing and detections over the weekend. This is the first time in over four months that the case count has defied this trend. The last time this happened was on August 23. Cases had risen on that Monday because of a huge dip the day before due to the Rakshabandhan festival.

This Monday, the national test positivity rate (TPR) jumped to over 4.15%, from 3.11% a day earlier, as the number of tests fell by nearly 20% on Sunday to around 8.9 lakh.
Monday was the seventh consecutive day of rising cases in the country. During this period, infections have risen nearly six times, up from 6,242 cases last Monday.
Maharashtra continued to post the highest number of daily cases among states, with 12,160 new infections detected on Monday, a slight rise from the previous day’s tally of 11,877. Mumbai logged 7,928 cases, a slight drop from Sunday’s number. Bengal posted 6,078 new cases, a marginal drop from the previous day's count of 6,153. With reduced testing, the state's TPR zoomed to 19.59% from 15.93% on Sunday. Goa reported an even higher TPR of 26.43%, rising nearly 16 percentage points in a day as cases surged from 388 on Sunday to 631. Delhi cases numbers spiked to 4,099, up 28% from the previous day's tally of 3,194.

Amid these soaring numbers, the death toll from the virus has not been rising much. India recorded 77 deaths on Monday, a marginal increase from 58 on the preceding day. Taking old deaths reported on Monday into account, the toll rose by 118, with data from three states yet to be counted.