More on Covid-19

NEW DELHI: As India goes into the second phase of lockdown, health ministry officials said the focus would now be on controlling the spread of Covid-19 from the affected areas to newer regions.The health ministry said it takes nearly a month of zero-case reporting for the spread of the disease to be halted in a particular area."We believe that the disease spread has stopped in an area if there is no new case for 28 days," Luv Aggarwal, joint secretary in the health ministry, said while justifying the need to extend the lockdown till May 3.He added that during this period the focus is going to be on breaking the chain of transmission and to promote behavioural changes needed to fight this pandemic.On Tuesday, India’s count of new Covid-19 cases returned to three figures with 944 fresh infections being reported, down from Monday’s peak of 1,276, but still the second highest reported so far. Maharashtra remained at the centre of India’s virus outbreak, reporting another 350 cases and as many as 18 corona-related deaths, more than half of all fresh fatalities in the country. India’s death toll from the virus was close to the 400-mark at 393.The health ministry said that during the second phase of the national lockdown, the focus will be on on breaking the chain of the coronavirus transmission and promoting behavioural changes needed to fight the pandemic. Till date, nearly 380 out of 732 districts in the country have been affected by the outbreak. The good thing is there are 25 districts which reported Covid-19 cases earlier but they have had no positive case in last 14 days, said an official Delhi, which is the second most coronavirus-affected state, recorded 51 new cases and two Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, taking its Covid-19 tally to 1,561 and the death toll to 30.A total of 16,282 people have been tested for Covid-19 in Delhi. Of this, 1,561 (9.58%) have tested positive and 13,748 (84%) have tested negative. The results of other samples are awaited, officials said. To speed up testing, they added, the state government has decided to involve private labs for testing for Covid-19 if government-run facilities are overburdened. Maharashtra, for the second day in a row, recorded at least 350 new cases, with 200-plus cases reported from Mumbai alone. The total cases in Maharahstra on Tuesday shot up to 2684 cases. The state also reported 18 deaths.However, the good news was that the case fatality rate had declined to 6.37% from Monday’s 6.55% and Sunday’s staggeringly high 7%. On Tuesday, 23 people got discharged from city hospitals and went home. Overall, 164 people have recovered from the infection in the state.Rajasthan recorded 108 new cases, its highest singleday tally, including 83 from Jaipur, taking the state tally of Covid-19 to 1,005. Among those who tested positive included a two-year-old infant from Pokhran (Jaisalmer).Meanwhile, Meghalaya became the 32nd state/UT to record a Covid-19 case on Monday night, after a doctor of a private hospital here tested positive, chief minister Conrad K Sangma said. "One person in Shillong has tested positive for Covid-19. He is a doctor at Bethany Hospital," Sangma said.