Coronavirus in India: Despite lowering daily cases, Delhi, Kerala displaying reverse trends

Coronavirus in India: While the coronavirus cases in the country are on a decline, some states have been displaying counter-trends. On Wednesday, Kerala reported about 7,000 new cases and became the sixth state to have crossed the 5 lakh-cases milestone. While that in itself is not worrying, since UP also crossed the milestone a few days earlier, the key aspect is that the southern state went from 1 lakh cases to 5 lakh cases within exactly two months, according to a report in IE. Meanwhile, UP has been adding fewer daily cases as compared to Kerala, while the latter seems set to become one of the five states with the most caseload.

Before reaching the 1 lakh-cases milestone on September 11, Kerala had been managing the pandemic well for about half a year. However, since then, the cases have been rapidly rising in the state, which has also been the biggest contributor to daily infections several times in this period, the report added.

Maharashtra and Karnataka are the two states which have recorded more cases in the two-month period than Kerala, the report stated. While Maharashtra reported more than a whopping 7.16 lakh cases in these two months, this figure stood at 4.13 lakh for Karnataka.

Kerala would be the state to be most concerned about, if it weren’t for Delhi. The national capital has been outnumbering the southern state every day for some time as its daily cases reach new highs day-by-day. Delhi reported over 8,500 cases on Wednesday, and in the one week preceding that, the national capital accounted for most new cases in India on five days. Moreover, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Delhi reported over 80 deaths, for the first time since July, the report said. Recently, no state other than Maharashtra has been reporting COVID-19 deaths in such high numbers.

India on Wednesday reported nearly 48,000 new daily infections, keeping up the trend of daily cases below 50,000 for more than a fortnight. Meanwhile, the US and some other countries have been reporting unprecedentedly high numbers of infections. The US, which has the highest caseload in the world and is the only country with more total cases than India, has been recording more than 1 lakh cases for the last one week.