At 29.2% positivity, daily new cases past second wave's peak

New Delhi: As the daily Covid positivity rate in the Capital rose to over 29 per cent on Thursday, Delhi's fresh cases in a day surpassed that of the peak of the brutal second wave with 28,867 new cases reported but the hospitalisation rate remained close to 16 per cent. Significantly, the number of daily deaths came down on Thursday compared to the reported tally a day before — to 31 even as active cases in the city rose to 94,160.

A total of 164 Covid deaths have been recorded in the first 13 days of January. According to the death audit committee's analysis, most of the 97 Covid patients who died between January 9 and January 12 had co-morbidities. Seventy of them were not vaccinated and 62 were aged below 60.

Delhi's previous biggest daily jump of 28,395 cases was recorded on April 20 last year — in the middle of the brutal second wave. According to the data, Thursday's positivity rate is the highest since May 3, when it was 29.6 per cent.

At present, 2,369 Covid patients are admitted to Delhi hospitals. Of these, 98 are on ventilator support, the health department data showed even as Health Minister Satyendar Jain insisted that the Capital had likely hit the peak of this wave considering the stabilising hospitalisation rate.

However, Jain conceded that new infections continue to rise along with the positivity rate but he said this could be attributed to the higher testing being done in the city. As per the latest bulletin, Delhi is conducting around 98,000 tests every day.

Insisting that the hospitalisations were under control, Jain told reporters that the hospital admission rate when 27,000 cases are being reported is the same as when 10,000 cases were recorded.

"This is an indication that the wave has plateaued," he said, adding that the hospital admission rate is a "major indicator of the situation" and not the number of infections or the positivity rate. He said that considering this, the Delhi government is currently not planning to escalate bed capacity dramatically.

The health bulletin data from Thursday showed that 2,424 of the 15,433 hospital beds in the capital are occupied and 84.29 per cent are vacant.

But even as the health bulletin data showed that the number of Covid positive patients admitted to ICUs had now risen to 628, Jain said that very few of these patients were in intensive care for Covid-19. "Most of the patients are those who are being treated for some other disease… This means that patients admitted in hospitals are getting admitted less due to Corona but more due to other diseases and since they also have Corona, they are also

included in the count of patients admitted to ICU beds which

are designated for Corona patients," the health minister explained.