Fatalities below 100 after 47 days
New Delhi: The Capital on Sunday continued its downward trend in Corona cases as the Delhi government reported 946 new infections in
the last 24 hours. And for the first time since April 13, the city on Sunday reported less than 100 daily deaths from the virus at 78.
While the downward trend has been on in the city for the last few weeks, the daily death figures had remained over 100 — a concern for authorities managing the second wave of the pandemic here.
This comes after the Delhi government had faced a barrage of questions over its method of reporting Covid deaths during this recent second wave, which brought the Capital's health infrastructure to its knees.
For weeks together, the data of Covid cremations and burials had shown gross under-reporting on the Delhi government's part. However, as the curve started flattening, the Delhi government's death audit committee seems to have caught up.
At the peak of this second wave, the city had reported 448 deaths in a day on May 3 — the highest ever daily death count for the Capital since the pandemic began last March.
But even as the death toll from the virus on Sunday evening reached 24,151, this does not include the scores of lives lost on Delhi's streets during the most recent wave due to a lack of hospital beds, medicines, and oxygen. Several patients recovering at home had also succumbed to the disease waiting for oxygen or a hospital bed, not all of whom have been accounted for.
The Delhi government has not yet clarified whether they intend to re-calculate the number of deaths with new information at their disposal.
This current wave had started around mid-March and peaked around the end of April but its severity can be gauged from the fact that even from official figures reported in the daily bulletins, more people had died in this wave than in all the previous waves before it put together.
This had happened for several reasons but especially because of the sheer active caseload, which had crossed the 1 lakh-mark for several days leaving the city's healthcare infrastructure in shambles. The previous wave that
had hit the Capital had peaked out at around 44,000 active cases before starting its dip. This year's wave, however, peaked at well-beyond the 1 lakh-mark at the end of April and this is when the Capital's hospitals were gasping for oxygen and many had also died because of a lack of oxygen supply.
As per Sunday's health bulletin, the active case count in the city had now dipped to 12,100, of which 5,817 are recovering in home isolation. The daily positivity rate, which had reached over 36 per cent at the peak of this wave, now stood at 1.25 per cent.
The fatality rate in the city stands at 1.69 per cent, the Delhi government added.
According to the Covid health bulletin, 1,803 patients have recovered from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours.
Delhi had on Saturday had recorded 956 fresh COVID-19 cases, the lowest in over two months, and 122 fatalities.
However, despite this dip in cases, the Delhi government has decided to extend its Covid lockdown for one more week, cautiously only allowing construction and manufacturing activities till the next phase of "unlock" can be decided. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has said that the progress made in the last few weeks cannot be in vain and added that more restrictions might be put in place if and when cases rise again.
