Bengal reported 396 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, shattering Thursday’s record of 344 and racing past the 6,000 mark of total patients.
The spike in the number of patients came just three days after the total figure had gone past 5,000, a week after 4,000 and 13 days after 3,000. The steady spurt has resulted in a deterioration in key indicators such as recovery rate and positive confirmation rate.
Bengal’s total number of novel coronavirus cases touched 6,168 on Tuesday. The figure was 4,009 a week ago and 2,961 a fortnight ago.
This is because high incidence of infection continued to be reported from across the state among migrant workers and others who had returned from elsewhere in the country during the lockdown.
Of the 396 new cases — reported till 9am on Tuesday — 394 (over 99 per cent) were from districts experiencing higher volumes of returnees. Of the new patients, 116 were in Calcutta, 74 in North 24-Parganas, 49 in Howrah and 38 in Hooghly.
With the surge in the new cases, the positive confirmation rate — the percentage of people found infected among those tested — deteriorated from 2.55 a week ago to 2.77 per cent. An increasing positive confirmation rate is indicative of higher levels of Covid-19 spread.
With 10 more persons succumbing to Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, the number of people who died directly from the pathogen touched 263.
Bengal on Tuesday reported the release of 104 more Covid-19 positive persons following recovery, taking the total cured cases to 2,410. The recovery rate fell to 39.07 per cent from 39.95 on Monday.
A Bengal minister pointed out the Cooch Behar district as a case in point of how the infected returnees had been impacting the stats. “Cooch Behar had been a green zone with zero cases till the first half of Friday. There were 32 found later in the day. In a matter of just four days, the district now has 118 cases…. Almost all are returnees, many of them are asymptomatic.”
“On May 8 (after which the returns began in large numbers) the state had a total of 1,678 cases. In the past week alone, the state saw 2,159 new cases,” said the minister.
“This will continue for at least another two-four weeks,” he added.
As of Tuesday, there were 17,804 people at quarantine centres and another 1,46,538 in home quarantine. On May 8, there were 4,964 people in institutional quarantine and 9,576 people in home quarantine.