Maharashtra is nearing the 1 million Covid-19 cases mark on Friday. Since Wednesday, the state is recording 20,000 cases per day and the tally is on the rise. After a prolonged slowdown during which the state’s daily growth rate had steadily declined, the Covid-19 graph has seen a spirited rise in the state.
Reports said the fresh spurt is due to new cases being discovered. Pune alone accounted for almost 25 per cent of the new cases being detected. Besides this, a large number of cases are being reported from outside Mumbai and Pune, the heaviest urban conglomerations in the state.
However, there are pockets of areas with a markedly lower incidence with many districts showing less than 2,000 confirmed infections. In the last week of August, the case growth rate had fallen below 2 percent per day, but it has spiked again in September. The current daily growth rate in Maharashtra is 2.32 per cent, relatively higher than the national rate of 2.13 per cent. This led to Maharashtra’s Covid-19 growth going up in state-wise figures. Nashik now figures in the top 10 worst-affected cities, ahead of Kolkata or Ahmedabad with over 50,000 confirmed infections.
On the other hand, unlike Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, which has the second-highest caseload in the country, has a fairly uniform geographical spread. Moreover, amid a surge in Covid-19 cases in the country, the Union Health Ministry on Thursday directed all the states and union territories to mandatorily re-test symptomatic cases that tested negative in Rapid Antigen Tests to be tested again on the RT-PCR test.
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The single day spikes in the Covid-19 cases in the country were just under a lakh on Friday with the country recording 96,551 fresh cases and the highest death toll per day of 1,209 fatalities on Thursday.