Covid-19: Daily growth rate shows decline as India crosses 900,000 mark

As India crossed the 900,000 mark for Covid-19 cases, the health ministry said that the rate of growth in daily cases had declined to 3.24 per cent in July from over 31 per cent in March, even though the country had seen more 28,000 new cases daily for the last three days.

With various states and cities reimposing lockdown as Covid-19 cases surge, the health ministry said this was just an expansion of containment areas and should not be linked to lockdowns or unlocks.

“All containment areas have to follow a strict perimeter control or the cases will rise. Whenever there is a surge in any region then it has to follow all containment protocols,” said health ministry’s officer on special duty, Rajesh Bhushan.

Ten states account for 86 per cent of the total cases and two of these, including Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, make up for half of the total Covid-19 cases in the country.

“It is not like Covid-19 is spreading in the same way and pace across the country. There are many big states including Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh which are not in these top ten states,”  Bhushan said.

Health ministry also said that 22 states in the country were conducting more than 140 tests per day per million population, which is the benchmark set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for comprehensive testing. India is conducting 201 tests per day per million, according to the health ministry.

“We have advised states to ramp up testing to meet the WHO benchmark. It will help in early detection of cases and therefore provide timely treatment,” Bhushan added.

While total recovered cases are 1.8 times the active cases, 20 states and union territories have shown higher recovery rate than the national average of 63 per cent.

In terms of fatalities, a few states are witnessing higher fatality rates than the national average of 2.64 per cent including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.

Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) chief, Balram Bhargava said that the human trials of the vaccine have begun at different sites each of which will carry out clinical testing of the vaccine on 1,000 volunteers. “60 per cent of vaccines supplied in the world are of Indian origin. Any vaccine candidate produced in any part of the world will have to be scaled up by India or China. We are putting in all our efforts to fast track the vaccine,” Bhargava said.