(TibetanReview.net, Aug17’20) – The Covid-19 growth rate in India of both new cases and deaths had slowed considerably in the past week, noted the timesofindia.com Aug 17. But it also said that the surge in cases as well as deaths continued over the past seven days, making it the deadliest week yet of the pandemic in the country.
It said, citing data collated from state governments, that Covid-19 cases grew by a little over 4.3 lakh during the week (Aug 10-16) at a rate of 5.9%, significantly lower than the 10.9% growth in the previous week (Aug 3-9), when nearly 4.1 lakh new cases were detected. The week before that, Jul 27-Aug 2, had seen a growth of 16% in new cases, the report added.
The report said the slowdown in growth was evident even in absolute numbers. It pointed out that new cases this week were just a little over 24,000 higher than the previous week. And last week’s numbers were more than 40,000 higher than the week before (Jul 27-Aug 2), which in turn had seen over 51,000 more cases than the week preceding it.
The trend in Covid-19 deaths was reported to be similar, falling from the growth rate of 17.5% during the week of Aug3-9 to 4.4% last week.
The reported added that it might be too early to conclude that the Covid-19 pandemic was slowing down in the country unless this trend continues in the coming weeks.
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Meanwhile, the latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 57,981 new cases and 941 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Aug 17 at 8AM, taking their totals to 2,647,663 cases and 50,921 deaths.
A total of 1,919,842, or 72.51 %, had recovered, so that the number of active cases was 676,900, or 25.56 % of the total. The case fatality rate has dropped to 1.92%.
The latest daily number of new cases, at 57,981, was more than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 53,584, which meant an addition of more than 4,000 in the number of active cases in one day.
The positivity rate, the number found to be positive out of the total of those tested, was 7.92%. The requirement for bringing the pandemic under control, according to the WHO, is stated to be 5%.
Besides being the country with the third highest total number of infections, standing behind the USA and Brazil, India is also the country with the fourth highest number of covid-19 deaths. Only the USA, Brazil, and Mexico have reported more deaths than India.
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Eight states, namely Maharashtra (595,865↑11,111), Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal, and Bihar (152,580↑652) had reported more than 100,000 cases each so far in that order.
Five other states, namely Telangana, Gujarat, Assam, Rajasthan, and Odisha had reported more than 60,000 cases each so far in that order.
Nine other states/Union Territories, namely Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Uttarakhand, and Goa had reported more than 11,000 cases each in that order.
Besides, there were 11 other states/Union Territories with a total more than 1,000 cases each, namely Puducherry, Tripura, Manipur, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Ladakh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Meghalaya, and Sikkim in that order.
Only Mizoram had less than 1000 cases at (789↑12).
Maharashtra also had the most number of deaths at 20,037 (↑288); followed by Tamil Nadu with more than 5,700 deaths; Delhi with more than 4,100 deaths; Karnataka with more than 3,900 deaths; Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal with more than 2,400 deaths each; Madhya Pradesh with over 1,100 deaths; and Rajasthan, Punjab, Telangana, Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Assam, Kerala, Uttarakhand, and Chattisgarh with between 876 and 141 deaths each, and so on in that order.
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The total number of Covid-19 cases among Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan stood at a total of 90 (↑2) so far, of whom 20 were active, 68 had recovered and two had died, according to the tally of the Central Tibetan Administration as of Aug 17 morning.
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Across the world the number of Covid-19 cases totaled 21,692,518 and the deaths 77,545, according to the tally of Johns Hopkins University as of 1:57:47 PM on Aug 17, 2020.
