At 2,612, Covid death toll in Delhi highest in November

The high death toll had prompted the Delhi High Court to intervene, as many people were dying because there were no beds available in hospitals.

While the city saw several days last week where the day’s death count crossed 100, the case fatality rate has been lower than than in June. While at the end of June the fatality rate was 3.1%, it stood at 1.6% by the end of November.

A total of 1.78 lakh cases were seen in November.

Experts had predicted the increase in cases during the festive season in November and said that the case count would start coming down after two to three weeks of Diwali.

“The situation was worrisome in mid-November, not because of the high case count, but because of the shortage of ICU and ventilator beds. We had expected the cases to rise, primarily because we are testing over 60,000 people per day. In many cases, late admissions were the reason behind the high death count. Over the past week, though, things have improved and we are hoping cases will keep reducing. People will have to maintain social distancing or there could be another spike,” a senior Delhi government official said.

The compounded daily growth rate over a week was 1.37% over the last week of October.

This dropped to 0.94% over the past week.