As many as 39,726 new Covid-19 cases were reported in India in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry informed on Friday. Out of this number, Maharashtra accounted for over 25,000 cases for the second consecutive day.
The state had logged 25,833 fresh cases on Thursday, the highest since the outbreak of the pandemic last year. On Friday, it reported 25,681, which is over 60 percent of the countrywide total of daily coronavirus cases.
State capital Mumbai also reported its biggest hike in cases for the second consecutive day, recording 3,062 Covid-19 cases in the 24-hour period, which is the city’s highest single-day increment among its total cases ever. With this, Mumbai’s total active cases reached 20,140, whereas its overall coronavirus total stands at 3,55,897.
As a response, the Maharashtra government ordered that all theatres, auditoriums and offices in the state would operate at 50 percent capacity. “All private offices except related to health and other essential services to function at 50% capacity,” the order stated.
It, however, allowed government and semi-government offices to take a call on staff attendance.
Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said on Friday that another lockdown was an option to stem the growth of the virus in the state. “I see a lockdown as an option going ahead. But I trust people of the state to cooperate (and follow the COVID-19 norms voluntarily) like the last time,” he said.
A worrying figure for the state government is the large number of active cases in the state, which, as per the latest Covid-19 bulletin put out by the state’s health department, stands at 1,77,560. At present, there are 8,67,333 people in home quarantine and 7,848 people in institutional quarantine across Maharashtra.
Apart from the new cases, the state also reported 70 Covid-related deaths in the past 24 hours. The state’s case fatality rate stands at 2.20 percent.
According to the data put out by the state government, Maharashtra has tested 1,80,83,977 laboratory samples for Covid-19 so far. Of these, 24,22,021 tested positive for the disease, taking the state›s test positive rate to 13.39 percent.
Other major industrial cities in the state, including Nagpur and Pune, have also seen a sharp rise in cases.
Doctors are blaming the resurgence in cases on people’s relaxed attitude to mask-wearing and other social distancing measures, warning that hospital wards were swiftly filling up. “It’s a proper second wave,” Amit Thadhani, medical director of Niramaya Hospitals in Mumbai suburb Panvel, told Reuters.
A doctor at King Edward Memorial government hospital in Mumbai, one of the oldest in the city, also spoke to Reuters: “If cases continue to rise like this for a week or so, a crisis is imminent”.
The state health minister, Rajesh Tope, said they had requested 2 million vaccine doses per week from the union government, with the aim of inoculating 300,000 people per day. “We are aggressively vaccinating people,” Tope told reporters.
New Delhi also reported a steady rise in infections over the last two weeks, prompting city authorities to scale up its immunisation drive to 125,000 doses per day, from about 40,000. The national capital recorded 716 new coronavirus cases, which is the highest in over 2.5 months, and 4 deaths in the last 24 hours.
Punjab also witnessed a total of 14,366 cases of the coronavirus with 1,046 new cases in the last 24 hours on Friday.
With the addition of fresh infections, the total cases in the country have reached 1,15,14,331, including 2,71,282 active cases and 1,10,83,679 recoveries. The death toll stands at 1,59,370, including 154 fatalities recorded in the last 24 hours.