New Mumbai Cases (1,333) Highest In 7 Mths, State Nos Max In 75 Days

Positivity Rate Jumps In City, Most Since May

- Sumitra Deb Roy & Bhavika Jain

Mumbai: Maharashtra reported a 75-day high in new Covid infections with 2,172 cases on Tuesday. Mumbai, which is largely driving the surge, saw its highest daily detection (1,333) in seven months. The silver lining was the low count of Covid fatalities—22 in the state and one in Mumbai. The state also didn’t detect any new Omicron infections on Tuesday, thereby restricting the cumulative tally of the new variant to 167.

The exponential rise in cases pushed Mumbai’s daily positivity rate (PR) to 4%, a seven-fold increase from the PR on December 1. The city has not had such a high positivity rate since May when the second wave had started to recede. The city’s daily positivity had dropped under 5% towards the end of January before it started to rise again from February and reached an average of 20% in March and April.

On Tuesday, the addition of 2,172 cases in the state was a consistent jump seen for the seventh day. The state’s Covid tally has reached 66,61,486. About 61% of the cases came from Mumbai, which has been observing a rise for nearly a week now. Monday was an exception when a marginal slump was seen due to low testing. A weekly comparison shows that from 1,300 cases reported in the first week of December, the numbers rose to almost 1,500 in the second week and roughly 1,900 in the third week. But between December 22 and 28, newly detected cases touched 5,478, an over 320% jump from the first week. Mumbai’s cumulative Covid-19 tally has reached 7,73,031.