Haryana: Active Covid caseload dips below 1,000; weekly infections 376

Sushil Manav
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, July 12

For the first time since February, the active caseload of Covid in the state has gone down to less than 1,000. The weekly new cases have also dipped to 376.

However, R naught (also called R0 or R number) or the reproduction rate, which determines how much the infection can spread in the coming days, is unmoved at 1 for the past four weeks.

28 test positive

• With six deaths and 28 fresh cases, the Covid tally of the state reached 7.69 lakh on Monday
• One death each was recorded from Hisar, Panipat, Sirsa, Mahendragarh, Bhiwani and Fatehabad
• Sirsa recorded five new cases. No case was reported from 11 districts

The R naught value of the state is higher than the national figure of 0.88, according to health experts. Haryana, which reported 376 fresh cases and 64 deaths in the past seven days, had 902 active cases as on Monday evening.

The last time the state had less than 1,000 cases was in the last week of February this year. New infections started rising with the start of the second wave and the figure went up to 21,087 on May 31 till these started ebbing.

The lower number of new infections and better recovery rate (98.64 per cent) has resulted in more than 20-fold dip in active cases in the past 42 days since May 31.

As on Sunday, barring Hisar (123) and Panipat (108), 20 out of 22 districts had less than 100 active cases. Ambala, Charkhi Dadri, Nuh, Fatehabad, Mahindragarh, Palwal, Yamunanagar and Sonipat districts have 20 or

less than 20 active cases left now.

“The R number signifies the average number of people that one infected person will pass the virus to. The R number can be affected by a range of factors, including not just how infectious a disease is, but how it develops over time, how population behaves, and any immunity already possessed,” said Dr Dhruv Chaudhary, head of the pulmonary health department of PGIMS-Rohtak and state nodal officer for Covid-19. During the pandemic peak, the R value had touched 1.39 in the month of May, but it started ebbing gradually and dipped to 1 by June 20, where it is stable since then.

Chaudhary said R of 1 was a crucial threshold, because an R figure that was even slightly over 1 could lead quickly to a large number of cases due to exponential growth. Say an R of 1.5 would see 100 persons infect 150, who would in turn infect 225, and so on. In three rounds of infection, the number of people with the virus would have more than quadrupled to 438.

“Conversely, with an R of less than 1, the number of new infections will keep dipping and the virus will eventually peter out,” Chaudhary added.