MUMBAI: While the state and city administration got busy with setting up preemptive measures against the new variant of concern, Omicron, detected in southern Africa, the Covid-19 tally continued to drop, with the state registering 889 cases on Saturday.
In Mumbai too, daily cases dropped to 210 cases. After three days of a surge in fatalities, the tally dropped to under 20 on Saturday. The caseload of the state rose to 66.33 lakh and deaths stood at 1,40,908. But an analysis of the cases showed that the number of new cases (1,710) in November 17-24 increased by 16% over the previous week (1,472). In neighbouring Thane as well, the weekly cases went up from 729 to 959 in that period. Fresh detections in the state rose from 5,929 to 6,452 in the same period.
BMC additional commissioner Suresh Kakani said the rise was not significant. “The cases did not increase more than 50 per day. This could be due to changes in number of tests done on that date,” he said. Moreover, the daily positivity rate in the city has been consistently under 1% for months now. The BMC update on Saturday showed that 35,692 tests were done, leading to a positivity rate of 0.58%. “As long as the positivity rate is low and cases are between 200 and 300, there is no reason to worry,” he added.
