News Analysis India

Tag: Mumbai Covid cases

  • Mumbai reports 20,971 fresh Covid cases, mayor says CM to decide on further curbs soon

    By Online Desk

    Mumbai on Friday reported 20,971 new Covid infections and 84% of the cases were asymptomatic, according to the civic body data. 

    In the last 24 hours, the city also reported six deaths. With the cases crossing the 20,000-mark every day, the question of more restrictions is looming large. 

    Mumbai mayor Kishori Pednekar, however, said there has been no decision on night curfew. A final call on imposing further restrictions, which ministers have so far ruled out, will only be taken after CM Uddhav Thackeray’s meeting with PM Modi, the mayor said.

    There is no immediate need for imposing lockdown or additional restrictions in Mumbai as the bed occupancy rate, oxygen requirement and number of Covid deaths are low, municipal commissioner Iqbal Chahal said on Friday.

    During the first and second wave the decision to impose lockdown was taken on the basis of case positivity rate, but this criterion cannot be applied for the third wave which started on December 21, 2021, Chahal told a Marathi news channel.

    No further restrictions were needed to be imposed on travel by local trains as only fully vaccinated people are being allowed to board the trains, he said.

    ALSO READ | 7-day home quarantine a must for all international flyers coming to India: Centre

    “The criterion in the first and second wave was the positivity rate. But in this wave of Omicron variant of the virus, two new criteria should be occupancy of hospital beds and oxygen requirement,” Chahal said.

    The administration has so far imposed only a few restrictions such as the ban on the assembly of five or more persons during nighttime and the shutting of schools in the city, he said.

    Of over 20,000 people who tested positive for coronavirus in Mumbai on Thursday, only 1,180 were hospitalised and 110 were on oxygen support, the BMC chief said.

    As many as 5,900 out of 35,000 hospital beds are occupied at present, he said. “At least 83% of beds are currently vacant and oxygen requirement is not even 10%. During the second wave, we used 235 MT of oxygen (per day). Considering these factors, there is no need for lockdown in the current situation,” Chahal said.

    “Lockdown cannot be imposed only on the basis of numbers (Covid cases). It depends on how many beds are vacant in our hospitals, how much oxygen is required and how many deaths are taking place. These are more important,” he added.

    He conceded that since December 21 last year the positivity rate has gone up significantly. But in the last 16 days, the city recorded only 17 deaths. Active cases have crossed one lakh, but the death rate is only one per day, he said.

    “We are keeping a close eye on the situation. I personally review things three to four times a day,” the commissioner said.

  • Mumbai logs over 20,000 Covid cases, sets new record; 4 more die

    By PTI

    MUMBAI: The city of Mumbai on Thursday reported 20,181 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, a fresh all-time high daily count and up 5,015 from a day ago, while four more patients succumbed to the infection, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said.

    With these additions, the financial capital’s coronavirus tally jumped to 8,53,809, while the death toll climbed to 16,388, the BMC said in a bulletin.

    On Wednesday, Mumbai had logged 15,166 new coronavirus infections, surpassing the previous all-time-high of 11,163 logged in April 2021 during the second wave of the pandemic.

    As many as 10,860 cases were reported in the metropolis on Tuesday.

    Mumbai Mayor Kishori Pednekar had on Tuesday said if the daily COVID-19 cases here cross the 20,000-mark, a lockdown will be imposed in the city as per the Union government’s rules.

    Pednekar suggested that citizens wear triple-layer masks while travelling in public buses and local trains. She also appealed to them to get vaccinated at the earliest and follow all COVID-19-related standard operating procedures (SOPs).

  • Double mutant found in 50% of Covid samples tested in Maharashtra

    Express News Service
    NEW DELHI: Nearly 50% of the Covid samples undergoing whole genome sequencing are now showing double mutation, strongly pointing to its role in the current avalanche of infections, The New Indian Express has learnt.

    On February 4, the proportion of samples with double mutation — B.1.617—E484Q and L452R together — in Maharashtra stood at just 3.4% but had grown to over 23% on March 4 and has been rapidly growing ever since.

    The B.1.617 variant of coronavirus has also been found in samples from eight states but the proportion is much smaller than that of Maharashtra, which has been reporting over 60,000 cases daily for the past several days.

    Overall, the country is recording over 7% growth in active cases which has now crossed the 16 lakh mark and at least 12 states in India are reporting an explosive surge in daily cases.

    Data from other countries suggest that while E484Q can escape antibody neutralisation, L452R is known to increase infectivity and has been linked to a cluster of infections in many parts of the US earlier

    The Union ministry of health and family welfare and the agencies under it have been maintaining that there is no epidemiological link yet established between the detection of the mutant and the ongoing second wave.

    ALSO READ | As Maharashtra registers its highest-ever COVID spike, Pune becomes state’s pandemic hub

    “It is increasingly becoming clear that this double mutant virus may be behind the surge in cases,” said a scientist attached with the sequencing project.

    Another scientist said that signals of locally dominant mutations driving outbreaks — N440 in Kerala and B.1.618 in West Bengal—have also been noted.

    The ministry however has steered clear of saying so publicly. On Friday, it released a statement on the government’s genome sequencing efforts and said that of over 13, 614 samples of Covid virus whose whole genomic sequencing have been carried out, 1,189 samples have tested positive for variants of concern. It also pulled up three states–Maharashtra, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh–for not sharing clinical data of patients that can be used for epidemiological studies in the context of mutation. 

    A VOC is a variant with some potential public health implications like the VOCs from the UK, Brazil and South Africa.

    The Centre in December had formed a genomic surveillance consortium — INSACOG — of 10 institutes under the NCDC to work on genome sequencing of virus samples from various parts of the country amid concern over detection of the UK variant in India.

    Details of the findings carried out through the surveillance exercise, however, have remained unavailable to the public while the Centre has issued information in bits and pieces.

    In another statement on Union health minister Harsh Vardhan’s review meeting of 11 surge states, the ministry, for example, said on Saturday: “double mutant strain in Maharashtra was a key point of concern.” It however did not clearly say that the variant was linked to the massive spike in cases.