January now has highest deaths in seven months

January now has highest deaths in seven months

Hospitalisation, positivity rates see steep spike as infection overwhelms population

Anantnag: With a steep spike in the test positivity rate of Covid infections, there has been a considerable increase in hospitalisation rate as well, pushing up Covid fatalities to a seven-month-high this January.
Between January 1 and 18, there had been more than 1700 percent increase in test positivity rate, Kashmir Reader had reported. Since then there has been a further increase in the rate, a steep one.
On January 21, the government said it conducted a total of 82,903 tests in the last twenty-four hours and found 5,720 people positive for the Covid infection. “Which means that the positivity rate has risen another few notches. The current positivity rate as per the figures is over 6.8 percent,” an official privy to the data on Covid-19 told Kashmir Reader.
He said that the positivity rate at the beginning of the month was just 0.25 percent, and has been increasing despite the fact that the number of daily tests has been increasing as well.
“As a result, we have had over 43,000 fresh cases in the first 21 days of January,” the official said, adding that the huge numbers are adding to hospitalisation rates as well as active caseload.
The hospitalisation rate at the beginning of this month was so negligible that it did not even feature in the data maintained by the administration. It was only on January 13 that the administration said that 261 beds were occupied against the 4,794 Covid dedicated beds across the union territory, which translated into a hospitalisation rate of 5.4 percent.
In just over a week, the number of beds occupied now has swelled to 466, with a hospitalisation rate of 9.33 percent. “It was expected. The number of fresh infections has been so overwhelming that the hospitalisation rate was bound to swell, despite the infection being touted as mild this time around,” the official said.
The official warned that if people did not take the infection seriously, the hospitalisation rate was going to spike further. “This is quite obvious,” he said.
Meanwhile, from just 1,397 active positive cases on January 1, the number of people with active infection has gone up beyond 34,000. “Which essentially means that the recovery rate has dropped substantially,” the official said.
Kashmir division has the bulk of these active positive cases, over 23,000, while Jammu’s tally of active positive cases stands somewhere around 11,000.
Also, the number of deaths reported this month has gone up to 63, which is the highest death toll in the last seven months. “The highest death toll in previous 6 months was in July when 55 people had died. January has already witnessed 63 deaths and we are still counting,” the official said.
The official requested people to stop being careless and adhere to Covid Appropriate Behaviour.

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