The number of active COVID-19 cases in the national capital increased for the fourth consecutive day on Saturday with 1,276 new cases being reported in the past 24 hours, taking the total to 1,51,928, said a health bulletin released by the Delhi government.
Also, 10 more deaths were reported, pushing the toll to 4,188. Of the total cases, 1,36,251 people have recovered and 11,489 are active cases.
The number of active cases has increased from 10,868 to 11,489 in the last four days. On July 1, there were 27,007 active cases in the city, which fell to 9,897 on August 4, but has remained above the 10,000 mark since then.
A Delhi government official said that the city is witnessing a slight increase in the number of cases and other parameters compared to July, probably because people are going out more than before because of the relaxations.
Testing below capacity
But the number of new cases has been below 1,500 for the past 30 days, which is less compared to June. On June 23, the daily new COVID-19 cases touched almost 4,000 — the highest so far — but has been dropping since then.
Though Delhi has a capacity to conduct around 11,000 RT-PCR tests in a day, only 5,667 tests were done in the past 24 hours.
Of the total 18,271 tests done in the city in the past 24 hours, over 68.9% were rapid antigen tests, which have shown lower positivity rate compared to RT-PCR tests.
The positivity rate, which is the percentage of people testing positive, has also dropped from 12.2% on July 1 to 6.9% on August 15.
The number of containment zones in the city stood at 538 on Saturday.
