Improving rate of recovery nullifies the high per day Covid caseloads during Durga Puja

Bengal experiences remarkable improvement in covid recovery rate during and after pujas

Friday, 30th October 2020

On this Tuesday, Alapan Bandyopadhyay, Chief Secretary of West Bengal conducted a meeting with the top government officials of the state to analyze the Coronavirus pandemic situation post the Durga puja festivities that ended one day back.

Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal had addressed this meet via telephone. WB’s chief secretary ordered the health officials to make use of the present infrastructure to boost the rate of testing.

Since October 22nd, nearly 20,496 Covid cases were recorded in the state and Durga puja had commenced from that date. However, an increase in the recovery rate kind of blunted the rise in the number of covid cases. During the same time period the rate of recovery jumped from 87.44% to about 87.76%.

On this Tuesday, 3,957 infections were recorded in the state. This is the first time in a time period of more than a week that lesser than 4,000 covid infections were recorded. This showed a drop in active covid caseload settling it at 37, 172 for the first time in more than 1 month.

The rate of test positivity has increased too despite a drop in the testing numbers. On this Tuesday, it was about 8.16% up from the start-of-month stat of 7.96%.

As per the West Bengal health bulletin, in which the stats are updated until 9 am, about 296 deaths were recorded in the state since 22nd of October, with about 58 recorded deaths on this Tuesday. Among the people who passed away in this time period are a doctor and also a constable of Kolkata Police.

The uptick in the rate of recovery was followed by a drop in the caseload of active cases in the district of North 24 Parganas, the epicenter of the pandemic in Southern Bengal, below 7, 000. This stat was recorded on this Tuesday. The drop settled it at 6,973. Active covid cases have come down in Kolkata also, but it was 7,136 still on this Tuesday.

Outside the hotspot of infection, eight districts of the state, of which the five districts are in Southern Bengal, have over 1,000 active covid cases. They are the districts of Paschim Medinipur, Purba Medinipur, Pashchim Burdawan, Purba Burdawan and the Nadia district in Southern Bengal and the districts of Darjeeling, Malda and Jalpaiguri in the Northern Bengal.

Source: Indian Express