With the majority of Covid-19 cases reported in the month of September, Mumbai is likely to cross 0.2 million Covid-19 cases on Monday. Over 50, 000 cases were reported in September so far, the highest number of cases recorded in a month. The city crossed the 0.1 million-mark on July 18. However, the trend of a spike in daily cases post the Ganesh festival in August has continued with over 2, 000 cases a day reported frequently.
So far, there have been 198,846 Covid-19 cases reported in Mumbai, including the 2, 261 cases reported on Sunday. The Covid-19 positivity rate is 18.15%. Of the total, 1.62 lakh Covid-19 patients have recovered and been discharged.
Civic officials partially attribute the surge to increased testing capacity in the last month. “We have conducted over 15, 000 Covid-19 tests a day, at most, and 9,000 -11, 000 Covid-19 tests are conducted every day on an average in mid-September. Cases are directly proportional to the number of tests. We have scaled up testing as compared to 4,000-6,000 tests per day in June when more than 1,000 cases were being reported,” a senior civic official said. The BMC has so far conducted 1.082 million Covid-19 tests across the city.
Areas like Borivali, Malad, Andheri, Jogeshwari, Dadar and Kandivali that have reported over 10, 000 cases each, have also reported a significant number of active cases. As per Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) data, R central ward (Borivali) has the highest number of active cases, 2,287, among all 24 administrative wards in the city, followed by K west (Jogeshwari) which has reported 1,965 active Covid-19 cases and P north (Goregaon), which has reported 1,472 active Covid-19 cases. Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, has reported 3,140 Covid-19 cases, of which only 188 are active so far.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 fatalities in the city have also increased with the total death toll reaching 8,794. However, BMC has managed to bring down the death rate from 5.7% in July to 4.4%. Senior BMC officials said that their current focus is to bring down the fatality rate through their ‘Mission Save Lives’ strategy.
