India's coronavirus cases are doubling at a slower rate post lockdown: Centre
NEW DELHI: Country’s doubling rate of COVID-19 cases has been 6.2 days in last one week as against the 3 days recorded before the nationwide lockdown was imposed, the Centre said on Friday.
The doubling rate in 19 states and Union Territories are even lower than national average doubling rate, said Lav Aggarwal, joint secretary in the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in the daily briefing on infection outbreak.
These states and UTs include Kerala, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Ladakh, Puducherry, Delhi, Bihar, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Assam, Tripura.
“The ratio between COVID-19 patients who have recovered and deaths stands at 80:20 in the country, which is higher than that of several other countries suffering due to the health crisis,” Agarwal said.
So far, 13.6 per cent of those infected have recovered from the virus.
A total of 1,749 people have been cured, he announced, while with 1,007 fresh cases in the last 24 hours. The total number of confirmed cases in the country has reached 13,835. A total of 23 new deaths have also been recorded in the last 24 hours due to infection.
“We have been witnessing an average growth factor of 1.2 since April 1, which stood at 2.1 on an average between March 15 to March 31. So, there is a 40 per cent decline in average growth factor as we ramped up our COVID 19 testing,” said the JS.
According to ministry officials, the decline is the result of increased testing, including that of patients suffering from severe acute respiratory illness and influenza-like illness.
As the latest update, a total of 1919 COVID facilities with 1,73,746 isolation beds and 21,806 ICU beds are now available across the country.
The total number of tests has reached nearly 3.2 lakhs and of these over 28,000 were conducted on Thursday. The number of public sector labs conducting the test stands at 183 while 80 private labs or lab chains are also involved in the process.
A meeting of the group of ministers on COVID 19 under Union health minister Harsh Vardhan was also held on Friday in which impact of extended lockdown and ways to create a further roadmap were discussed.