india

Updated: Apr 25, 2020 03:48 IST

Maharashtra’s death toll in the coronavirus disease outbreak passed 300 on Friday and the number of patients was within striking distance of 7,000 , but a medical expert said it was premature to judge that the state had entered the stage of community transmission after 32 days under lockdown.

Maharashtra detected 394 new cases of Covid-19 on Friday, taking the total to 6,817, including 5,279 in the . Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Eighteen more deaths -- 11 of them in Mumbai city -- vaulted the state’s death toll to 301. In Mumbai city alone, the case count went up to 4,447 as 242 new cases were registered on the day.

The growing number of coronavirus cases despite the lockdown, which was imposed in the state at midnight on March 23, prompted the government of chief minister Uddhav Thackeray to cancel all the relaxations that took effect on April 21 within a day.

Even so, Friday’s increase in the number of cases was far lower than the 778, a record single-day jump, that had been reported on Thursday in Maharashtra .

Maharashtra took 30 days to cross 1,000 cases on April 7, and exceeded 2,000 in six days on April 13. From 2,000 to 4,000 cases on April 19, it took six days. But for the number of cases to rise from 4,000 to 6,000 cases, the state took only four days.

Although the numbers are high, senior officials said the state was yet to reach the community transmission stage, and there had been no exponential growth in Covid 19 cases. Community transmission is deemed to have started when a person with no recent history of travel and no exposure to a Covid-19 patient tests positive for the disease, and the source of infection cannot be traced.

“The two 14-day cycles of incubation of infection were completed on April 20. It had begun from March 22 when international traffic was stopped. We will have to wait for another seven days to see the rising trend,” said Dr T P Lahane, head of the Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER).

“If the rise continues and if the number of fresh cases is rising more than 50% (over the previous day) on a daily basis then it can be called exponential growth and only then we can say that the stage of community transmission has arrived,” Dr Lahane said, adding that exponential growth too is of two levels -- one entails a 50% rise in daily cases and the other a doubling of cases.

“If exponential growth continues, then the state government will also have to extend the lockdown period for another three weeks till May 24 to break the incubation cycle,” Dr Lahane said.

One silver lining is that the mortality rate dropped significantly in Maharashtra to 4.40% on Thursday from 7.41% on April 13.To be sure, it continued to be higher than the national mortality rate of 3.11% until Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Maharashtra government is set to start clinical trials of plasma therapy after receiving approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to do so.

In the beginning, the therapy involving use of the antibody-rich plasma -- a blood component -- of recovered coronavirus patients on people with the disease will start at Sassoon Hospital in Pune as permissions for other three hospitals in Mumbai, Nagpur and Solapur are still awaited. The state has also got permission for pool testing for Covid-19.

“We have received permission from the Centre for conducting clinical trials of plasma therapy in the state. Once cleared by the ethics committee of the state, it is going to be started in the next 3-4 days at Sassoon Hospital, Pune. It will also be started at JJ Hospital in Mumbai, Indira Gandhi Medical College in Nagpur and Solapur Medical College in Solapur once permissions are in place,” said Dr Lahane.

(With inputs from Swapnil Rawal)