Capital reports 19,133 new cases, 335 deaths

Positivity rate falls below 25%; people still struggling for beds

Rapid antigen test in progress at a centre in the Capital.

Delhi reported 335 COVID-19-related deaths in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of deaths to 18,398, according to a health bulletin released by the Delhi government on Thursday.

Out of the 78,780 tests done in the day, 19,133 new cases were reported, taking the total cases to 12,73,035. Of the total cases, 11,64,008 people have recovered, leaving the active case tally at 90,629.

A bigger cause for optimism was that the test positivity rate fell to 24.29% on Thursday, 26.37% on Wednesday and 29.56% on Tuesday. This means that about 24 out of 100 people taking the test are now COVID-19 positive.

The positivity, which is the percentage of people testing positive out of the total tests done, has fallen below 30% after almost two weeks. There was a sharp rise in positivity from 3.5% on April 1 to 36.2% on April 22. But since then, it has stayed below it. Lowering positivity is a good sign, according to experts. Ideally, it should be below 5%.

Difficulty for beds

At Lok Nayak Hospital on Thursday evening, the situation was better compared to two weeks ago, when there was a mad rush of ambulances.

But people said that they were still finding it difficult to find hospital beds. “On April 28, this was the sixth hospital we came to. First, they said that there were no beds. We waited from 7.30 p.m. and finally when our oxygen cylinder got over at 12.30 a.m. and the patient was about to fall, they gave us a bed,” said Rakesh Saini, whose mother-in-law is admitted at the hospital. The family was desperately looking for an ICU bed for her on Thursday evening, but with no luck.