BENGALURU: In a small but significant way, there is something to cheer about on the Covid-19 front. The State’s positivity rate dipped marginally from 8.81 per cent on Saturday to 8.80 per cent on Sunday.
This is for the first time that a drop in Covid-19 test positivity rate (TPR) has been recorded since April 4 when the rate was as low as 4.63 per cent. The number of patients testing positive for every 100 tests conducted (positivity rate) kept rising since that day.
Health Department officials have attributed that to an increase in the number of tests, which now totals 3,06,00,450 (3.06 crore) since the pandemic struck Karnataka in March second week last year. The State Government has already announced that lockdown restrictions will be relaxed once the positivity rate dips below 5 per cent. Health officials say this may just be the beginning of a decline towards that mark.
Officially, all indicators point towards an improved situation over the next few days, except for the mortality rate which has been on the up consistently for the past few weeks. The daily addition to Covid cases has seen a huge drop. While 12,209 cases were added to the tally on Sunday, the highest addition that the State saw through the pandemic was on May 5 when a whopping 50,112 cases were recorded in a single day. The following two days saw 49,058 and 48,781 cases, respectively.
The number of active cases (patients currently under treatment) saw a fall from the peak of 6,05,494 cases on May 15 to 2,54,505 as on Sunday – a span of three weeks. Even the recovery rate has shown a robust uptick. The state’s recovery rate had reached a high of 98.05 per cent on January 31, but fell to a low of 69.83 per cent when the second wave intensified. However, it rose to 89.38 per cent on Sunday. What has kept the health officials worried is the high number of deaths on a daily basis across the State.
K’taka sees 320 deaths, 12,209 fresh cases
Though the number of Covid- related deaths in the state came down to 320 on Sunday from the highest of 626 on May 23, over the past few weeks the daily toll has consistently been above the highest single day deaths of 179 recorded on September 18 last year.
Meanwhile, health officials attribute this to a range of reasons, including late admission, self-medication when patients should be admitted, and lack of awareness over managing the disease in the early days after infection.