Daily Covid deaths see sharp rise as Delhi reports 22.7K new cases

New Delhi: The Capital reported 17 fatalities due to COVID-19 on Sunday, the highest in a day since June 13 last year, and added 22,751 cases to its tally of infections as the positivity rate soared to 23.53 per cent, the city's health department data showed.

Delhi has logged 53 fatalities due to coronavirus this month so far. A total of 54 fatalities were recorded in the last five months — nine in December last year, seven in November, four in October, five in September and 29 in August.

While fresh cases are increasing rapidly since the beginning of this year along with the positivity rate, the daily deaths from Covid had maintained at below 10 for so long. The recent spike in Covid deaths shows that daily deaths saw an increase of 140 per cent compared to the daily deaths report a day ago. Significantly, health department officials and the Health Minister Satyendar Jain have said that most cases in the city are now of the Omicron variant. Official data showed that till Friday no Omicron patient had been put on oxygen support and no Omicron patient had died so far.

However, the Delhi government is yet to divulge details on the genome sequencing results of the Covid-19 deaths reported in the last week.

The 22,751 fresh cases reported on Sunday are the highest since May 1 last year when 25,219 people were diagnosed with the disease. On June 13 last year, 23 deaths were reported in Delhi due to the disease. The positivity rate of 23.53 per cent was the highest after May 7 last year when it was 24.9 per cent.

Delhi currently has 60,733 active cases, of which 35,714 are in home isolation. As many as 1,618 Covid patients are in hospitals. Of them, 44 are on ventilator support, government data showed. Of the 14,222 Covid-dedicated beds in hospitals, 1,800 (12.66 per cent) are occupied.

A total of 96,678 tests, including 79,954 RT-PCR ones, were conducted the previous day. The Delhi government has been stressing that most cases this time are mild or asymptomatic and do not require hospitalisation. In fact, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also reiterated this on Sunday saying that hospitalisation and deaths this time were lower than before. But even as he cautioned people to be responsible and keep wearing masks, the city reported 17 Covid-19 deaths in a single day - the highest in at least four to five months.

In a bid to stymie the coronavirus spread driven by its Omicron variant, the city government has already announced a host of restrictions, including night and weekend curfews. According to officials, the low hospital bed occupancy rate is the reason the authorities have not implemented the restrictions prescribed under the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP).

Health Minister Satyendra Jain had earlier said authorities devised different levels of restrictions and alerts under the GRAP keeping in view the severity of the infection caused by the Delta variant of the virus. However, the severity and the hospitalisation rate this time is quite low, he had said.

The Delhi Disaster Management Authority, which devices Covid management strategy for the capital, will hold a crucial meeting on Monday to discuss the way ahead.

But even as authorities work on preparing the required infrastructure to deal with the unprecedented surge, the key problem of this wave has been the isolation of hundreds of doctors and health workers after testing positive — leading to a growing staff shortage.

While just six big hospitals had reported over 750 doctors testing positive so far till Sunday morning, several other hospitals continue to report cases among health workers daily. In fact, the AIIMS here has had over 100 doctors testing positive every day and going into isolation. According to officials, the hospital saw nearly 500 doctors testing positive in just the last three days.