High recovery, low fatality rates offer glimmer of hope

India shows an impressive recovery rate of more than 60% and the rate of people testing positive is decreasing, despite the country surpassing Russia to reach the third spot among countries that have been the worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic, experts said. Of the top four countries, the US has 2,888,729 covid cases, Brazil has 1,603,055, India 714,015 and Russia 686,777, according to data from Johns Hopkins University’s live tracker of the disease.

“While India has reached No. 3 in number of cases, the comforting fact is the high recovery rate of over 60% and low fatality rate,” said Himanshu Sikka, lead - Health, Nutrition & WASH,IPE Global, an international healthcare development consulting firm.

“A lot of credit for this goes to the decisive lockdown done in the early stages of the epidemic. However, as India opens further, all stakeholders need to work collectively to ensure that gains so far don’t get eroded and we continue the low doubling rate and high recovery rates,” said Sikka.

The Union government has said that it has emphasized increasing testing, prompt contact tracing and timely clinical management of the cases. It has also helped the states to significantly ramp up testing capacities, which has resulted in reduced covid positivity rate in the country.

As of 5 July, India has a positive rate of 6.73% at a testing rate of 6,859 tests per million. The states with their positivity rate lesser than the national average and tests per million higher than the national average are Puducherry (5.55), Chandigarh (4.36), Assam (2.84), Tripura (2.72), Karnataka (2.64), Rajasthan (2.51), Goa (2.5) and Punjab (1.92).

The Centre said that the efforts being made by Delhi were significantly bolstered by the Union government to ensure increase in testing. Tests were ramped up through increased RT-PCR testing along with the new Rapid Antigen Point-of-Care (POC) tests, which gives results in 30 minutes.

“The average number of samples being tested per day, which was only 5,481 (1 to 5 June), has witnessed a huge increase to reach an average of 18,766 samples per day between 1 to 5 July,” the Union health ministry said in a statement.

“In spite of significantly increased testing in Delhi, the positivity rate has seen a substantial decrease from about 30% to 10% in the last three weeks,” the ministry said.

Meanwhile, the number of covid-19 tests has crossed the 10 million (1 crore) milestone, the health ministry said on Monday. During the past 24 hours, 346,459 samples have been tested. The cumulative number of samples tested as of now is 1,01,35,525.

As of Monday, more than 1,105 labs have enabled people to undergo covid-19 tests. There are 788 labs in the government sector and 317 private labs.

“While mortality has been kept under check as compared to many other countries, the growing numbers and the spread to more parts of the country are a cause of concern and need to be immediately addressed,” said Dr Ravi Gaur, member, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) Health Services Committee and COO, Oncquest Labs.

Meanwhile on Monday, the National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization (NATMO), functioning as a subordinate department under the ministry of science & technology, published the fourth updated version of the covid-19 dashboard.

The updated version has special features such as a single-map window through which a user may get a wide range of information related to covid-19. It has state-wise and district-wise covid-19 statistics such as confirmed cases, recovered, deceased, rate of recovery, and rate of death.

It also has information of health facilities such as hospitals, testing labs and blood banks shown on the same map frame.

Users may also find individual health facility information at a higher zoomed level.

Some useful information for common people like address, categories, and city locations have been indicated with an information tool.

The cartographic preferences for data visualization have been considered and adopted to ensure easily interpretable data visualization.