India’s COVID-19 situation improves, but it still has a long way to go

India crossed the one lakh mark for deaths due to COVID-19 on October 3, making it the third country to report more than a lakh deaths, preceded by the United States of America (2.08 lakh deaths) and Brazil (1.45 lakh deaths).

Meanwhile, there is a ray of hope as India showed some positive trends over the past two weeks in its fight against the coronavirus. Declining test positivity rate (TPR) is an indicator. Besides, the number of active cases has also remained below million-mark and is declining bit by bit every day.

The Test Positivity Rate (TPR) is the percentage of positive cases per hundred tested samples. The TPR of the country which had been above eight (8 in 100) for months has come down despite increase in the number of tests over the last week. Though the absolute number of cases is on the rise, the decline in TPR suggests we are inching towards curbing the spread.

Though the death rate, meaning the number of deaths per hundred infected patients, looks lower, the actual number of deaths has become a cause of concern. The corona death rate in the country currently stands at 1.56 per cent which is declining further.

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The country has reported 7,463 deaths during the last week which is slightly lower than the previous week’s count of 7,760 deaths. On an average, 1,066 deaths were reported every single day. The current death toll of India stands at 1,00,842 cases.

Increasing recovery rate and decreasing active cases is another positive sign in the current pandemic situation. The number of recoveries (5.78 lakh) had been more than the number of new cases (5.69 lakh) during the last one week. The difference is of 8,510 cases compared to 45,235 in the previous week. The number of cases has also declined.

The overall number of cases in India stands at 64.73 lakh as of Saturday of which, 5.69 lakh (or 8.79 per cent) have been reported during the last seven days.

An average of about 81,000 cases was reported every day during the last week, a drop from 86,000 cases for the previous week and 92,500 for the week prior to that. Thus, this decline also suggests that the country is inching towards flattening the curve if not curbing the infection.

Positive developments on different parameters is satisfactory, but the country still has a long way taming the virus.