A day after the number of active Covid-19 cases in the city fell below 1,000 for the first time since April last year, Delhi marked an important landmark in its pandemic fight on Monday as the test positivity rate fell below 0.1% for the first time ever, and daily infections fell to a nearly 15-month low, showed the state government’s daily health bulletin.
The test positivity rate — proportion of samples tested that return positive for Covid-19 — dropped to 0.09% on Monday, the lowest ever recorded in the city since the pandemic broke out in early March last year.
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Experts and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend a test positivity rate below 5% for at least two weeks in a region for an outbreak to be considered under control. The number in Delhi has been below this mark for 46 days, and below 1% for 36 days.
Daily infections on Monday also fell to their lowest since April 15, 2020, as Delhi added just 54 fresh Covid-19 cases. This took Delhi’s overall case count to 1,434,608, while two more deaths took the toll to 24,997.
The city added an average of 88 new cases every day over the past week, the joint-lowest since the week-ending April 21 last year, when Delhi logged an average of 85 new cases.
The number of active cases — people currently battling Covid-19 — which on Sunday dropped below 1,000 for the first time since early April last year, fell further to 912, showed Monday’s health bulletin.
Of these, 566 people are admitted in hospitals across the city, even as a majority of Covid-19 beds in the Capital remain vacant. Over 96% of the 14,662 hospital beds earmarked for Covid-19 patients are empty, according to state government records.
“The number of cases going down is natural; our study in collaboration with WHO has shown a very high sero-positivity [in the city]. A wave of any infection can happen only when there is an adequate pool of susceptible people. For example, we see dengue cases increase every four or five years in Delhi because there is a susceptible population by then,” said Dr Puneet Mishra, professor of community medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
“There will be some ups and downs in the number of cases, but the delta variant was so infectious that a very high proportion of people in Delhi have already been exposed, protecting them against another infection from at least six to 10 months, as the current evidence suggests. In the meanwhile, we are also expanding the vaccination net; people who do not have immunity from a previous infection will get it through immunisation,” said Dr Mishra.
