NEW DELHI: The rate of growth of fresh COVID-19 cases continues to surge in the national capital with 2,814 positive cases being reported within the first week of May, but the mortality rate remains low. There is also a lack of clarity as to where the new cases are emerging from. While new containment areas have not been announced over the past week, many such areas, instead, have been de-sealed.
"We have control over new cases as of now. Increasing numbers of new positive cases are increasing in quarantine centres," said a top official from the one of District Magistrate office. Another DM official though, noted that there is a mix of cases.
"We are taking adequate measures to contain the virus. We are now focusing more on another strategy called micro-containment. In this we focus on containing micro areas such as a specific house or a cluster of houses. The micro-containment step is proving to be beneficial as we have achieved positive results so far," noted the official.
Over the past month-and-half, the Delhi government has been providing updates regarding coronavirus in the state through its daily health bulletin. However, over the period, multiple changes have been made to the bulletin.
The earlier bulletin which clearly classified new cases into three categories — those having travel history, those having tested positive from contacts (transmission from those with foreign travel history) and cases under investigation has now been dropped. From April 15, the government stopped shedding light on cases which were yet to be traced or their source of contamination. Till then, 85 COVID-19 positive patients were yet to be traced.
The government continued the other two categories – travel history and contacts and got a new category 'Others' instead of 'under investigation'. Based on that till April 17, the government had claimed 191 such cases whose source of contamination was yet to be identified.
From April 18 onwards the health bulletin became even less detailed and replaced the previously mentioned categories with only one column, ‘total positive cases’. The column of discharged patients was removed and recovered was introduced.
An official from the state health department noted that recovered patients were not the same as discharged with many of them belonging to Tablighi Jamaat who have recovered but still stay in quarantine centres owing to lockdown.
The government also recently stopped providing details of testing and samples collected per day for COVID-19. Earlier the bulletin had details of total number of reports received per day or samples processed from private and government labs. The bulleting now only provides a cumulative figure. On certain days, the government did not even provide details on samples taken.
The government had introduced a new column providing data on those areas which are under containment and had a category on residents being tested in those sealed zones. However, the government has stopped providing this figure as well.