For the first time since April this year, India recorded less than 1% deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic during the period of a month. The case fatality rate (CFR or death rate) dropped to 0.97% in September from a high of 3.07% in June.
While India continued to report a decline in fresh Covid cases as well as deaths from the virus, the fall in deaths was sharper than the drop in cases in September, leading to a decreased death rate.
India reported just over 9.5 lakh cases during the month, a 17.4% decline from August, when more than 11.5 lakh cases were logged, as per TOI’s Covid database.
During the same period, Covid deaths fell by 36.7%, declining from 14,653 in August to 9,272 in September. The toll from the pandemic in September was the lowest in monthly terms since March this year, when 5,755 fatalities were reported. Since then, the monthly toll had risen to nearly 1.2 lakh in May before falling to 68,576 in the following month.
India’s overall CFR since the beginning of the Covid pandemic is 1.33%. September is only the fourth month to record a death rate below 1%, the other months being February (0.78%), March (0.52%) and April (0.7%).
The CFR during the second Covid wave so far (March to September 2021) stands at 1.29%, as opposed to 1.41% in the first wave (March 2020 to February 2021). The second has so far seen over 2.3 crore cases, over 68% of all cases since the outbreak of Covid in India. The death toll in the second wave, at 2,93,871 so far, accounts for 65.5% of all deaths caused by the virus in India.
Meanwhile,
Kerala reported 15,914 fresh cases on Thursday, up from 12,161on the previous day. The spike raised the day’s all-India Covid count to 27,363, the highest in five days. There were 276 deaths from the virus reported in the country on Thursday.
Number of districts with above 5% Covid positivity declines from 60 to 48 in a weekConsistent with the overall decline in Covid-19 cases across the country, the number of districts reporting above 5% positivity has also come down significantly in the current week, even as Kerala and the northeastern states still continue to have most ‘districts of concern’ with high positivity rate.
The number of districts with more than 5% Covid positivity has dropped to 48 during the week ending September 29, as against 60-66 districts till last week, health secretary Rajesh Bhushan said. Of the 48 ‘districts of concern’, 30 have above 10% positivity with majority of them in Kerala (13) and Mizoram (8). Manipur and Arunachal have three such districts each, whereas Sikkim and Meghalaya have two and one, respectively. The 18 districts with positivity ranging between 5-10% are also mostly in the northeast region.