Despite the rise in fresh COVID-19 cases in Pune, the number of recoveries has risen significantly and active cases have declined, Pune civic body authorities said on Thursday.
Rubal Agarwal, additional municipal commissioner and CEO of Pune Smart City Development Corporation Ltd, said in the past week up to May 6, an average of 50 patients were discharged daily, while the doubling rate is now 11 days.
Drop in doubling rate
She said, “Till April 16, cases were doubling every five days but since then the doubling rate has improved from eight days to 11. We are striving hard to ensure that this rate is lengthened more in the coming days with intensive screening and testing.” Ms. Agarwal said the ratio of active cases to total positive cases recorded, has declined from 79% on April 28 to 65%, as of Wednesday.
“From a cumulative 1,122 cases in Pune city on April 24, the time taken to roughly double this number has lengthened, with the tally reaching 2,040 only on May 6,” she said.
Dip in active cases
At least 95 new cases — most of them from Pune city — were reported on Thursday. The tally, which includes deaths and recoveries, in Pune district — Pune city, Pimpri-Chinchwad and Pune Rural — rose to 2,395, while the death toll rose to 128. Of them, 116 were reported from Pune city. However, of these 2,395 cases, only 1,587 are active and 88 are said to be critical.
Authorities said 680 patients had been discharged in the district, and 600 in Pune city, of which half of them have been discharged in the past seven days. Ms. Agarwal said while the city’s death rate is still high at 5.8%, it had climbed down from 6.5% a week ago. “We now have 46 mobile medical vans, which have screened 50,000 people in the five highly infected wards in Pune city. We are concentrating our efforts in ‘red zones’ since the past 10 days and hope to detect cases quickly and bring down the death rate,” she said.
750 discharged
The tally in Pune division, which includes Satara, Sangli, Kolhapur and Solapur districts along with Pune, has risen to 2,734 with 142 fatalities, said Pune Divisional Commissioner Dr. Deepak Mhaisekar. A total of 750 patients have been discharged across the division, including 680 from Pune district.
Besides the 128 deaths from Pune district, Solapur reported one more death on Thursday as its toll rose to 10, with 176 positive cases.
Satara district has reported 113 cases and two deaths, and Kolhapur and Sangli have reported 15 and 35 cases respectively. Both districts have reported one death each so far.
