With Pune slowing down considerably and now reporting less than 1,000 cases a day, Bengaluru has emerged as the city with the second-largest number of coronavirus cases in the country, next only to Delhi. There has been a significant improvement in the situation in Pune in the last one month, with the daily number of cases going down at a steady rate. It had dropped below 500 a few days ago, but then has risen again after that. Bengaluru, in the meanwhile, has been reporting more than double that number, and last week overtook Pune’s total caseload. Bengaluru has so far recorded more than 3.38 lakh cases, while Pune has had a little less than 3.35 lakh. Delhi, which is in a midst of its third wave of infections, has recorded 3.91 lakh cases till now, and has been reporting more than 5,000 new cases for the last five days. For the first time ever, Delhi reported more cases than the whole of Maharashtra on Sunday. Nagpur, in the meanwhile, has become the eighth city in the country, and the fourth in Maharashtra after Mumbai, Pune and Thane, to record more than one lakh infection. Nashik is likely to be the next city to reach that milestone. October was the first month when the number of new infections showed a decline compared to the previous month. About 18.35 lakh new infections were detected in October, which was significantly lower than the 26.24 lakh in September and 20.18 lakh in August. 📣 Express Explained is now on Telegram There was only a 28 per cent rise in the total number of cases in the month of October, the lowest so far. The percentage monthly growth has been declining progressively and that is not a surprise considering that the base has been expanding continuously, but this is the first time that even absolute numbers have been lower than previous months (see charts). A little more than 47,000 new cases were detected on Sunday. It was the eighth consecutive day that this number has remained below 50,000. The active cases fell further to 5.61 lakh. Kerala once again contributed the maximum number of cases in the country. This has been the case for the last ten days now. Kerala has remained the fastest-growing state in the country for over a month now and has so far recorded over 4.4 lakh infections, more than half of which have come in the last month only.
