India recorded over 18,450 fresh cases in the past week (March 26-April 1), a 2.1x rise over the previous seven days’ tally of 8,781. The doubling time of cases has reduced to less than seven days. The last time the daily tally was more than doubling in a week was during the third wave.
On the positive side, the daily cases remain relatively low and the rise in Covid deaths has been modest. In the past seven days, 36 fatalities were recorded, up from 29.
Kerala reports highest Covid tally
As the number of fresh Covid cases more than doubled in the past week over the previous seven days, the sharpest spikes were seen in Kerala, Goa and the northern states such as Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and UP, as per TOI’s Covid database.
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In most of these states, the last seven days’ total was three times higher than the previous sevenday tally. Himachal Pradesh recorded the country’s sixth-highest weekly tally at nearly 1,200 new cases, up from 409. While the number of fresh cases remained relatively high in Maharashtra and Gujarat, where the virus has been spreading for a few weeks now, the rate of growth had slowed down in the past week in Gujarat while staying steady in Maharashtra.
Infections continued to rise at a steady rate in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, while showing a decline in Telangana and the beginnings of a surge in Andhra Pradesh. Kerala, with nearly 4,000 fresh cases in the past week, up threefold from 1,333, displaced Maharashtra as the state reporting the highest cases in the country.
Maharashtra’s tally stood at 3,323, up 70% from the previous seven days’ total of 1,956, when the state registered a 68% increase. With 2,412 new cases, Gujarat stayed among the top three states but the rate of rise in cases had slowed to 53% from 139% in the previous week.
While Himachal Pradesh reported a threefold increase in cases, Delhi logged 1,733 fresh infections in the past week, a 2.5x rise from the previous period count of 681. While the numbers in other states were relatively low, Punjab reported a 3.3x surge in cases, Haryana 3x and UP2.5x. This was the seventh straight week of increasing cases in the country and all key parameters have risen in the past week, indicating that the surge may be far from over yet.
The allIndia sevenday test positivity rate (TPR) — the percentage of samples testing positive for the virus — had risen to 2.3% by Saturday, up from around 1.4% a week back. Similarly, the number of active cases was over 18,300, having nearly doubled from last Saturday’s count of 9,400.
