Amid rising COVID-19 cases in Maharashtra, Mumbai witnesses downward trend

Though Covid cases are surging across the state, the city has witnessed a slight downward trend for the last few days. According to the data provided by the state health department, the cases across Mumbai have dropped by 11.43 per cent in the last seven days.

As per data, there were 14,089 covid cases between June 14 to 20 which further dropped to 12,479 between June 21 and 27. Officials said it is too early to comment that cases are plateauing considering testing has dropped.

Senior doctors said though cases have plateaued there is a need to be more vigilant for the next two weeks considering there might be a spike. Citizens need to strictly adhere to Covid norms to avoid contracting infections.

Dr Umang Agarwal, infectious diseases consultant, P D. Hinduja Hospital & Medical Research Centre said, “It’s too early to comment if this particular wave has actually plateaued with cases going down from the past couple of days. Let’s hope that it continues like this only then we will get a clear picture over the next few weeks,” he added.

“The variant which has been around by and large causes very mild disease. Through our experience, we have not seen a lot of deaths at our hospital, and whatever deaths have been reported, have been because of patients had underlying comorbidities and chronic lung diseases or some other problems who have been incidentally tested positive for Covid. However, Covid per se is not really responsible for the deaths this time,” he said.

Dr Pradip Awate, state surveillance officer said, although the trend is hinting towards plateauing of the curve, they will need two to three more weeks to confirm the epidemiological characteristic of the virus spread.

“Till now, the spread of infection is limited to certain districts, mostly cities where the movement of population is higher. This recent surge was mostly dominated by the new variant of Omicron – BA.4 and BA.5 — but due to high vaccine coverage, the severity was low and the spread was contained, unlike the third wave,” said Dr Awate.

Dr Avinash Supe, who heads the state government Covid death audit committee, said, “We are occasionally going to see death numbers like this. These deaths are still more sparse than what we saw during the earlier waves. Nothing is still alarming. Most of them are senior citizens and people with multiple comorbidities. I personally feel that the Covid daily cases will come down in the next few days but we will continue to see deaths as it happened in the last few waves.”

Published on: Friday, July 01, 2022, 09:26 AM IST