The Covid-19 test positivity rate in the national capital continued to dip on Saturday, falling to 7.41%, even amid a sharp uptick in testing that pushed up new cases by around 10%.
Delhi on Saturday added 4,483 Covid-19 infections, 10.85% more than the 4,044 cases on Saturday. However, this increase was likely on account of higher testing, which jumped to 60,532 on Saturday as against 47,042 the previous day.
Of the tests conducted on Saturday, only 7.41% samples returned positive results, showed the state government’s daily health bulletin, down from 8.6% a day ago.
The test positivity rate in Delhi during the city’s fifth wave of infections has largely been on the decline since January 15, when it peaked at 30.64%.
On January 16, this number fell to 27.87%, then to 22.47% on January 18, 18.04% on January 21, to 13.32% on January 23 and 10.59% on January 26.
The city added 28 deaths of the infection on Saturday, showed the bulletin.
More hospital beds were freed up in Delhi as well, with the number of occupied beds dipping to 1,771 (11.4% of the city’s total Covid-19 beds) on Saturday, from 1,928 a day ago.
Health experts said that Delhi has also, like Mumbai, passed its worst Covid phase in this wave.
“The daily cases are consistently dropping and this is indicating that the peak is over and the infections will fall further…The authorities should also now lift all the Covid curbs because all domain experts are of the opinion, based on scientific evidence, that restrictions do not work. They only delay the decline in cases. The only people who back restrictions are the ones who have vested economic interests,” said Dr Sanjay Rai, professor at the Centre for Community Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
