Patients from outside getting tested here, says Jain on Covid tally surge

New Delhi: Addressing the recent rise in daily new COVID-19 cases in the city, Health Minister Satyendar Jain on Sunday said this was happening as "patients from outside getting tested here". This might be corroborated with a sudden increase in testing following a slump in the week of Eid Al-Adha and Raksha Bandhan.

In fact, the recent rise in daily cases comes after Delhi had managed to go for three consecutive days, reported new cases in three-digits and the active cases here had dipped below 10,000 for the first time in nearly nine weeks.

On Saturday, the city reported 1,404 new cases along with 16 deaths being added to the toll. On Sunday, the Delhi government said 1,300 new cases were detected and 13 deaths were added. Daily deaths in the city have been consistently declining for weeks now.

"There have been reports that coronavirus cases are increasing in the national Capital. Many patients from outside Delhi are getting tested here, hence the rise in the number of cases.

"There is otherwise a decline in cases here," Jain told reporters.

Health Minister Jain, who himself has now beaten the contagious disease also attributed patients from outside Delhi for the slight increase in hospitalisations here. In June, Delhi Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal had overruled the AAP government's decision to reserve hospital beds in city-run and private hospitals only for residents of the national capital afflicted with the coronavirus infection.

The total tally of cases in Delhi rose to 1,45,427 with Sunday's figures and the death toll here increased to 4,111 with a total of 23,787 samples having been tested in the last 24 hours. Of these, 5,702 were RT-PCR tests and 18,085 were rapid antigen tests.

In an interview with

Millennium Post, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had justified the preference of rapid antigen tests over RT-PCR by saying both have chances of returning false-negatives but rapid antigen tests were more efficient to contain the spread of the virus.

He explained that rapid antigen tests were better to identify mildly symptomatic probable cases, which could stop them from going around the city and unknowingly transmit the virus to others. He had added that RT-PCR tests were being conducted on hospitalised suspects but those who were roaming around needed fast results so that they can be either put in isolation or on treatment plans at the earliest.

Also, the number of tests has shown a rise in the last few days and 24,592 samples were tested for COVID-19 on Saturday. After testing around 10,000 samples daily last week, authorities were quick to pick up the pace. The Capital currently has 10,729 active cases, of which 3,084 are recovering in hospitals and 5,462 are recovering in home isolation. A total of 11,92,082 tests have been conducted here so far with a rate of 62,741 tests per million of the population. The positivity rate in the city is currently at 5.46 per cent and the recovery rate stands at 89.79 per cent.

On June 23, the national capital had reported its highest single-day spike of 3,947 cases to date. Delhi now has 472 containment zones.