BENGALURU: In a convincing indication that the pandemic is in its death throes in Karnataka, 25 of 30 districts of Karnataka on Monday recorded zero Covid-19 cases. This is the highest number of districts registering no additional cases in a day, right through the pandemic which hit the state on March 8, 2020.
The five districts which did record Covid-19 cases were Bengaluru Urban (40), Chitradurga (2), Kolar (3), Mysuru (1) and Yadgir (2).
These were the districts which contributed to the total 48 Covid-19 cases added to the tally, which stood at 39,45,359 on Monday, according to the health department bulletin. The state’s positivity rate has dropped from the third wave peak of 6.21 per cent as on February 5, to 6.02 per cent. However, the first two waves had witnessed much higher positivity rate peaks.
The highest positivity rate witnessed in the first wave was 12.54 per cent on September 27, 2020, while the highest in the second wave was 8.81 per cent on June 4, 2021. Karnataka’s recovery rate had been a dismal 35.29 per cent on July 20, 2020, when the first wave of the pandemic was wreaking havoc on the state’s population. It rose to 98.06 per cent on January 30, 2021, when the wave was on the wane, only to fall again to a low of 69.83 per cent on May 11, 2021, when the severe second wave riding on the Delta variant peaked. The recovery rate rose to 98.94 per cent as on Monday.
The number of active cases in the third wave started to rise from 9,386 on January 1 this year to 3,62,487 on January 24 — in a matter of just 23 days. The number fell to 1,719 cases on Monday. The sharp rise in active cases has been attributed to the much less severe Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, which was, however, much more transmissible that the preceding variants.