COVID-19 situation in Capital better, cases showing downward trend: Jain

New Delhi: The COVID-19 situation in the city is far better now as compared to September and the daily cases have also begun to show a downward trend, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said on Saturday.

Delhi was at number two but now has come down to the sixth spot in the country in terms of the number of COVID-19 cases, he told reporters.

The minister reiterated that the city government had significantly ramped up testing capacity due to which a rise in COVID-19 cases was recorded for a long period in September.

"But now cases have begun to come down and it's sort of stabilised. Also, the positivity rate has fallen to less than 5.5 per cent from 8.5-9 per cent recorded earlier. So the situation is far better now," he said.

The national Capital recorded 37 more COVID-19 fatalities on Friday as the toll climbed to 5,438, while 2,920 fresh cases took the tally to over 2.85 lakh, authorities said.

The number of containment zones in Delhi jumped to 2,648 on Friday from 2,615 on Thursday.

On Friday, the positivity rate stood at 5.19 per cent while the recovery rate was over 88 per cent, the bulletin said, adding that the fatality rate was 1.9 per cent.

The Delhi government has significantly ramped up testing in the past few days.

The number of tests conducted and corresponding fresh cases reported, ranged from 24198 (2,312) on September 1 to 61,973 (4,071) on September 19.

On India crossing the one lakh-mark in terms of COVID-19 deaths, Jain said it is a "grim milestone". Asked about the protests over the Hathras incident, he said, toughest punishment should be meted out to culprits so that "such people have fear of the law and think ten times before taking such a step".

On the BJP-led civic bodies claiming crores of money due from the city government in terms of property tax to them, the AAP leader said "all payments have been done".

"BJP has been ruling the MCD for over a decade. It will get done only if they go out of MCD," Jain said when asked about the mitigation in the level of landfill sites in Delhi.

Meanwhile, the national Capital recorded 2,258 fresh COVID-19 cases on Saturday, taking the tally to over 2.87 lakh, while 34 more fatalities took the death toll to 5,472, authorities said. This is the second day in a trot that the city reported less than 3,000 new cases.

The city reported 34 deaths on Saturday, the lowest since September 25 when 24 fatalities were recorded.

The cumulative COVID-19 case count rose to 2,87,930 with 2,258 more people contracting the viral disease. The death toll stands at 5,472, according to the Delhi government's latest health bulletin. The Capital reported 2,920 new cases on Friday, 3,037 cases on Thursday, 3,390 cases on Wednesday, 3,227 cases on Tuesday, and 1,984 cases on Monday.

Of the total cases reported in Delhi so far, 2,57,224 have either recovered, been discharged or migrated out. As many as 39,306 tests were conducted to detect COVID-19 infection on Friday, of which 8,844 were RTPCR/CBNAAT/TrueNat tests and 30,462 were rapid antigen tests.

The health authorities have conducted around 4.74 lakh tests in the last 10 days — an average of more than 47,400 tests a day. The total number of tests conducted was 27,56,516 on September 24. It rose to 32,30,952 on Saturday.

The case positivity rate during the last 24 hours was 6.48 per cent while the cumulative positivity rate was 9.45 per cent.

The number of active cases decreased from 26,450 on Friday to 25,234 on Saturday.

Around 10 containment zones were added in the last 24 hours. The number of red zones was 2,658 on Saturday.