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India coronavirus cases: There are eleven districts in India right now which have reported more than 1,000 deaths of people infected with novel coronavirus. Together, they account for more than 42 per cent of all coronavirus-related deaths in the country, which exceeds 80,000 now.
While most of that list of 11 districts comprise of usual suspects like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Pune, it also includes three relatively smaller urban centres from Maharashtra. Nagpur, Nashik and Jalgaon have all reported more than 1,000 deaths till now. Their presence in the list is not entirely unexpected though. Nashik and Nagpur figure towards the bottom of the top ten list of cities with maximum number of infected people. Jalgaon has much lesser caseload, but that too figures in the top 25 cities.
In fact, there are three more districts from Maharashtra that are now approaching 1,000 coronavirus-related deaths. Solapur, Kolhapur, and Raigad have all reported more than 900 deaths till now.
That’s not surprising considering the fact that Maharashtra accounts for almost 40 per cent of all coronavirus-related deaths in the country. At 2.82 per cent, the state’s case fatality ratio (CFR), which is the percentage of people dying out of all the confirmed cases, is one of the highest in the country. The state also reports the maximum number of deaths in the country every day.
In the last three weeks, from the time India has started reporting more than 70,000 new infections every day, over 20,000 deaths have been added to India’s death count. This is about 1,000 deaths a day. This number is likely to go up in the coming days as people succumbing to the disease now are those who mostly would have been infected two to three weeks earlier. The surge in the infections that was witnessed during that time is likely to get reflected in the death numbers only now.
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All this while, however, the overall case fatality in the ratio has been declining, slowly but steadily. Three weeks ago, the CFR was 1.83 per cent which has now come down to 1.64 per cent. However, as several scientists point out, this calculation of CFR is slightly misleading, because people dying today are not from the group who have been detected positive today. There is usually a lag of two to three weeks. As such a more accurate CFR can be obtained if today’s death count is observed against the total confirmed cases two to three weeks ago. But since the time lag is not fixed, and there are plenty of cases in which patients have died within hours of being detected positive, for the sake of simplicity, CFR gets calculated as total number of deaths on a given date against total number of confirmed infections.
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Almost 84,000 new infections were detected on Monday, the first time in six days that this number has fallen below 90,000. And this is only because of the weekend effect. There is a sharp drop in the number of tests carried out on Sunday, because of which the number of positives reported on Monday goes down. This time the dip in testing numbers on Sunday was not as big as on some previous occasions, though. More than 9.78 lakh tests were carried out on Sunday, against the 11 to 11.5 lakh tests on previous days.
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The total number of confirmed infections in the country has gone past 49.30 lakh, and is all set to hit 50 lakh on Tuesday. The number of people who have recovered from the disease now exceeds 38.5 lakh, which is more than 78 per cent of confirmed infections.
