India’s daily Covid 19 growth rate has declined around 28% since March: Govt

The Centre on Tuesday presented a slew of data to highlight the positive aspects of India’s measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic since its outbreak. The government pointed out that the daily rate of growth of the disease was declining in India and that the high infection rate was restricted to a few states in the country.

“If you look, the daily growth rate in March was around 31%, it reduced to 9% in May and around 5 % by the end of May and if you look at the figures as on July 12, it has come down to 3,24%. There has been a progressive decline in the daily growth rate of new cases,” said Rajesh Bhushan, secretary, ministry of health.

He added that this important statistic often gets missed due to the tendency to focus on the total number of positive cases reported daily.

He argued that even in terms of absolute numbers, the difference between the recovered cases and the active cases was increasing with each passing day.

Highlighting another important aspect, Bhushan underlined that 86% of all positive cases registered so far in India are limited only to 10 states.

“Two of these 10 states—Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu alone account for 50% of the total number of cases reported together by the group. The remaining 36% of cases come from eight states including Karnataka, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal, Gujarat and Assam,” he added.

Building further on his argument, the official said that the situation in several large states like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh was relatively much better and this indicated that the spread of the disease in the country was not even.

On cases per million, the official cited that the world average of 1,638 cases per million was significantly higher than India’s 657 cases per million, which, when compared with eight worst affected countries, was even more impressive.

“Cases per million of the population in Russia and USA are 7 and 14 times respectively more than the corresponding figure in India,” the senior health ministry official said.

Similarly, he added that India had recorded 17.2 deaths per million compared to a world average of 73 casualties per million.

“Again advanced countries such as the UK, Spain and Russia had fared much worse with 660, 607 and 78 deaths per million respectively,” Bhusan said, adding, “There are some countries that have 35 times more than India’s rate”.

India is currently the world’s third worst affected country by numbers of Covid-19 cases registered so far. Its tally on Tuesday crossed the 9 lakh-mark with a total of 906,752 coronavirus patients registered till date since the outbreak. 571,459 of these patients have recovered while 23,727 have succumbed to death. The number of active cases stands at 311,565.

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