Covid-19 cases in Delhi have fallen further with the national capital recording 10,756 fresh cases on Friday. Not only did the absolute number of cases go down, the positivity rate – proportion of the total samples tested that return positive – also dipped below 20% in almost two weeks.
The positivity rate on Friday stood at 18.04%, meaning less than one in five samples tested were found to have the infection. In view of the dropping positivity rate, the Delhi Disaster Management Authority has allowed private offices to work with 50% capacity. Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal Friday rejected the government’s proposal to lift weekend curfew and ease other Covid-19 restrictions such as shops opening alternately on odd-even days.
Health minister Satyendar Jain on Thursday said that Delhi had crossed the peak of Delhi’s fifth wave. “Despite new cases every day, the number of patients admitted to the hospital is stable,” the minister said on Friday, there are currently 2,656 patients with the infection admitted to city hospitals. Of them, 156 patients are on ventilators and 769 on oxygen support.
Delhi reported 38 deaths due to the infection on Friday, lower than the 43 deaths recorded a day ago. The city has recorded 434 deaths with the infection in the month of January. This is the highest since June when 740 deaths were recorded as the second wave was on the wane. The peak of deaths usually lags behind the peak of fresh cases and hospitalisations, and the hospitalisations are yet to go down.
City doctors, however, have said that almost all patients admitted to the hospital are those with other conditions but were incidentally found to have Covid-19.
The number of tests being conducted in the city have also gradually increased over the last four days, after a dip to 44,762 on January 17 due to the new ICMR testing guidelines doing away with testing on demand for asymptomatic patients. The tests started going up after a letter by the Centre asking states and union territories where the numbers were going down to ramp it up. The government has since increased the number of samples collected from the community. With the government slashing prices of both RTPCR and Rapid Antigen test, the numbers may start going down again with private city labs saying that they cannot break-even at the rates.