After September, March worst with 55K cases, 981 deaths in Punjab

Tribune News Service

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Chandigarh, March 30

After September last year, now March has proved to be the worst month when it comes to Covid cases.

So far in 30 days, the state has reported around 54,614 cases and 981 deaths.

Despite the second spike, the number of deaths is almost half as compared to September last year. In September, the state had reported around 60,000 cases and 2,000 deaths.

Health officials said the reason for the low mortality rate was improvement in state’s intensive care infrastructure and expertise. “Now we have learnt from our experience and can handle critical patients in far better way than six months ago,” said Dr Rajesh Bhaskar, state’s nodal officer for Covid.

He said the Health Department’s campaign to motivate people to approach hospitals as soon as possible after developing symptoms had yielded positive results.

Following July, when just around 10,000 cases were reported, Covid cases started increasing massively and the state hit peak in September with around 60,000 cases. In the following months, the cases started declining. In October, the cases came down to almost 20,000. It consistently declined till the end of January when the number of cases came down to 6,754 and there were 153 deaths.

In February, the cases started increasing suddenly. Last month, the state had reported as many as 8,706 cases and 216 deaths.