6,725 new cases in highest daily spike push tally past 4L
New Delhi: Continuing with the trend of surging COVID-19 cases in the Capital, Delhi on Tuesday reported a whopping 6,725 new cases in its highest-ever single-day spike since the outbreak, taking the tally of cases here past the 4 lakh-mark. The city also added 48 deaths to its toll from the contagious disease, which now stands at 6,652, as per the Delhi government.
The capital city had witnessed a slight decrease in cases with 4,001 new infections on Monday after logging over 5,000 cases for five days in a row. Delhi had recorded 5,891 new cases on October 30. Significantly, Tuesday's cases came out of the over 59,500 tests conducted in the last 24 hours, of which 13,560 were RT-PCR tests and the rest were rapid antigen tests. As a result, the daily positivity rate came to about 11.29 per cent.
According to the Delhi government's official health bulletin data, as many as 3,610 people were reported to have recovered, taking total recoveries to 3,60,069. Active cases in the city as of Tuesday stood at 36,375, of which 21,521 are recovering under home isolation. The case fatality rate here is 1.65 per cent. However, the death rate from an average of data from the last 10 days stood at 0.84 per cent.
Currently, 6,798 out of 15,823 beds are occupied in the hospitals, 973 out of 7,887 beds in the dedicated Covid Care Centres and 358 out of 527 beds in the dedicated Covid Health Centres. Over 21,521 people are in home isolation. Delhi has a total of 3,453 containment zones.
Health Minister Satyendar Jain had earlier said that the number of contacts being tested per positive patients had been doubled in the last few weeks, which had resulted in the recent surge in cases. But he insisted that detecting more cases was the best way to handle the pandemic and added that the Delhi government had now switched to aggressive contact tracing
exercises. The Centre, meanwhile, has recommended targetted testing in markets, restaurants and other hubs of public gatherings, especially in light of the upcoming festivities.
