MUMBAI: The daily Covid graph in Mumbai worryingly rose to a 43-day high on Wednesday, with BMC registering 415 cases. On most days in the last five weeks, daily tally was under 300. It was last over 400 (430) on July 20 and dropped to its lowest in recent days to 196 on August 17. BMC officials refuse to speculate if this uptick marks the onset of the third wave in the city, but additional municipal commissioner Suresh Kakani said the BMC health machinery is on “alert”.
Across the state, daily tally rose to 4,456 after three days of a decline in trends. 183 fatalities were reported in the state on Wednesday, of which four were in Mumbai. With this, total fatalities rose to 1,37,496 in the state and 15,981 in Mumbai.
“Although the daily cases crossed 400, the number of corresponding tests were high at 41,929,” Kakani said. In other words, the daily test positivity rate remains under 1%.
Dr Shashank Joshi, a member of the state’s task force on Covid-19, said the increasing trend is most possibly a result of the unlocking that began on August 15. There is a need to ensure cases don’t rise sharply as they did in the second wave which began in February-March and crossed over 11,000 in a single day.
There are eight districts which have a higher positivity rate than the state’s average. Of the total 44,366 new cases added to the tally in the last week of August, 70% or 30,000 are from five districts, of which four are in western Maharashtra. Pune, Osmanabad and Ahmednagar are experiencing a surge with weekly positivity rate also rising.The state’s weekly positivity rate rose to 2.58% from 2.49% in the third week of August. In Mumbai, BMC has set up jumbo facilities across the city, with plans to increase Covid beds from 21,000 at present to 30,000 if needed.
Mumbai city guardian minister Aslam Shaikh said the government is monitoring the situation and there is no need for any restrictions at the moment, but citizens should continue to follow all Covid-19 related protocols especially during the festive season.