The deadly second wave of Covid in India has waned, and the number of fresh cases in the country has declined drastically over the past couple of weeks. In the last 24 hours, the country reported just 25,072 cases. Shockingly more than 50 percent of the coronavirus cases reported in the last 24 hours in India came from Kerala. On Monday, Kerala witnessed 13,386 fresh cases and 90 Covid-related deaths. Moreover, the daily test positivity rate (TPR) in Kerala stands at a dangerous 15.63 percent.
The reason behind the reduced Covid tally in India
Kerala has been recording the highest number of daily infections over nearly two months. However, over the past two weeks, the state witnessed a decline of 14 percent in the seven-day average of daily cases.
However, this plummeting in cases is not an actual sign of the waning of the pandemic in the state. A couple of weeks back, the state used to test more than 1,60,000 tests on a daily basis, and at that time the TPR was ranging from 10 percent to 12 percent.
However, the state authorities slowly reduced the number of tests, and on Monday, only 85,650 samples were tested. As the number of testing samples reduced, the number of fresh cases also witnessed a fall, but the TPR is now way above 15, which means the pandemic has not slowed down in the state.
If the number of Covid tests in Kerala gets increased, the daily fresh cases in the nation will also rise, and may even cross 40,000.
Dropping the number of Covid tests is not a good sign
In the meantime, a senior official at the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is not a positive sign. The official also noted that all the 14 districts in Kerala are showing a TPR of above 10 percent.
"There are about 40 districts in India showing test positivity rate of over 10 percent, of which one-third are from Kerala. This is not a good sign. When the contact tracing is inadequate, it is evident that not a sufficient number of people are being tested. Now a further drop in testing is not a good sign and may end up worsening the pandemic situation," the official told the New Indian Express.
