Health Minister: COVID cases in Delhi will decline soon, no plan of lockdown

Referring to the latest health bulletin, Delhi minister Satyendar Jain on Thursday claimed that coronavirus cases may decline across the national capital soon. "The rate of hospital admissions among COVID patients is stagnant for the last 4 days, thus cases may go down soon", Jain stated, calling it a good sign. He also asserted that Delhi may report around 27,500 Covid cases today as well but there is no plan of lockdown.

"Bed occupancy currently stands at 15%", he stated further, adding that no Omicron variant-related death has been recorded in the city till now. 

Earlier on Wednesday, Delhi saw 27,561 fresh Covid cases, the second-highest single-day tally, after 28,395 on April 20, 2021, and 40 Covid deaths – the highest since June 10 when 44 deaths were reported. Follwoing this, the Covid infection rate has jumped to 26.22 per cent, the highest after May 5 when the infection rate was at 26.36. 

With a 93.03 per cent Covid recovery rate, the active Covid cases rate in Delhi has gone up to 5.40 per cent while the death rate stands at 1.56 per cent. The number of Covid containment zones has risen to 20,878.

Meanwhile, India has logged 2,47,417 new coronavirus infections, the highest in 236 days, taking the total tally of COVID-19 cases to 3,63,17,927 which includes 5,488 cases of the Omicron variant. The country saw a single-day jump of 620 cases of the Omicron variant, the highest so far, taking the total tally of such cases to 5,488, out of which 2,162 people have recovered or migrated so far.

Maharashtra recorded the maximum number of 1,367 cases of the Omicron variant followed by Rajasthan at 792, Delhi 549, Kerala 486 and Karnataka 479. The active cases comprise 3.08 per cent of the total infections, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate decreased to 95.59 per cent, the Union health ministry said.